Claimed by the Machine by Emily Tilton – Sample

Chapter One

“Sala, did you hear?” asked Sala’s roommate Ava as Sala took her seat at the refectory table. Ava, blond and blue-eyed, of the ancient Nordic phenotype, had so much excitement in her voice that it came out nearly as a squeak.

Sala had only woken up a few minutes before, and her quick visit to her monitoring station, where she had surveyed the various couplings and larger groups in the guest chambers, hadn’t included a look at the news feed. Only one guest was awake, and he seemed happy to let a redheaded girl named Hera ride his cock in a sleepy, leisurely manner, holding her now well-punished bottom in his hands to move her pussy up and down as he fucked. Sala would have to look at the tape of what had gone on in that chamber while she slept, though; if the ambassador had kept Hera up all night, duty rosters would need adjusting.

“No, what?” she answered Ava, smiling despite her preoccupation. Ava was Sala’s best friend almost by default, because they spent so much time together and worked together so closely—including of course being made to have sex with each other very often as part of their service to guests. Sala loved the bubbly twenty-two-year-old, and so only one year Sala’s junior, no less, though, for their bond having been created by the software that had found them compatible as roommates to share the single big bed in their small but very comfortable quarters.

As Ava’s superior, of course, Sala sometimes had to punish her, as Sala herself sometimes was whipped by the director. Nothing in the rules, though, forbid them from retiring to their bed after such a punishment, so that Sala could comfort and soothe her roommate’s well-disciplined bottom, and Ava could return the favor like the good friend she was.

Now Ava practically hopped up and down in excitement. “An alien civilization made contact!”

Sala’s duties as the head girl of the Guesthouse, a hollowed-out asteroid towed into geosynchronous orbit over Magisteria, wealthiest world in or out of the Galactic Federation, included few things not directly related to sex. Those few things, however, were all by the very nature of the Guesthouse and her leadership position in it indirectly related to sex: when you run the finest, most luxurious brothel in the history of the galaxy, that tends to happen, she often reflected.

Sala usually didn’t mind—and she didn’t really mind today—but her early years had included a very fine education in science and culture at her submissive training academy, calculated to make her not just a pleasing but also a charming bed companion for the dominant men she would serve. Nor did she lack for conversation with them, and with her fellow concubines, here at the Guesthouse.

Not all the Guesthouse’s clients could discuss the most recent fluctuations in the price of gravitium and how they affected the difficulty of the Magisterian navy’s task in mopping up the remnants of the Vionian Empire, of course, over dinner after Sala had expertly sucked their cocks and drawn their seed, the usual way for an evening in the Guesthouse to begin. Nor did all of them want to; something like half the clients who chose Sala merely wished her to kneel under the glass table as they ate.

There she would continue worshipping at the shrine of their manhood, with the adoring little kisses that dominant men welcome even during their refractory period after orgasm. Then the command to suck again would come, and her master would enjoy Sala’s mouth around his hardening penis alongside the chop or steak prepared in the Guesthouse’s excellent kitchen, until he pushed the plate away and told Sala to go to the bed and bend over.

Enough of them could, however, have an interesting conversation, and wanted to, that she felt no real lack of intellectual stimulation. Most of her girls, too, had had the same sort of education Sala had, and so conversations about naval operations and diplomatic efforts, as well as the latest works of art and literature—all of course fully available to the girls of the Guesthouse just as they were fully available to the Guesthouse’s clients—took place nearly every day in the girls’ wing over the refectory table.

But at times Sala felt that her education and intellect had prepared her for a more active role in the affairs of the galaxy. As a Guesthouse girl she got to meet an extraordinary number of the men who ran the federation, and even a few of the ones who ran the intriguing independent worlds at its fringes, for they would often come to Magisteria for summit meetings and a stay at the Guesthouse wasn’t something any man cared to miss when he had ventured so far into the galactic center. Some of them regarded her as their favorite, and would tell her even after a night spent with Sala, her roommate Ava, and another pair of girls, that Sala held the key to their hearts—even that they thought of Sala as they handled the weighty matters in which they spent the rest of their active lives, and could scarcely wait to return to the Guesthouse to enjoy her.

She had never felt the frustration of her duties having to do entirely with sex more than she did when she heard that after something like six thousand years of on-again, off-again human civilization, three thousand of them including the colonization of the galaxy, contact had at last been made with another sentient life form. She had dreamed along with the early space explorers as she had learned about the first mission from Earth to Draco, about the catastrophic cutting off of communication between Draco and Earth, about the Draconian colonists’ discovery of gravitium, and about everything it had led to.

Those first colonists, it seemed, had always half-expected to meet the sort of aliens their art and literature had depicted, but even carbon-based life had proven terribly rare. Through all the chronicles of the wanderings and then the purposeful expansion in the fourth millennium, Sala had always felt a kind of sadness that the dream of finding wise companions who might protect the human race from itself or worthy foes to test the human mettle—not to mention the less honorable but perhaps more pervasive dream of finding a naturally weaker alien species to conquer and then to take into service—had never come true.

Now Ava, who had a rather adorable tendency to get things mixed up, seemed to be saying that on Scandia, a world on the fringes of the ongoing exploration of the galaxy by mapping drones, a newly planted colony had found an artifact, and the artifact had spoken to them.

“Spoken?” Sala said. “In words?”

“Yes, silly, in words,” Ava said, giggling. “How else can you speak?”

“What kind of artifact?”

“A metal pole?” Ava said doubtfully. “Like, sticking up out of the ground. Small, the report said. Just small metal artifact in the shape of a pole.”

“The government is probably keeping a lid on the news,” Sala speculated, munching a piece of bacon, still the most popular breakfast food after thousands of years, and now entirely healthy. “What did it say?”

But Ava didn’t seem to have any information to offer on this subject either. “The report just said that it greeted them and welcomed them to the planet. But isn’t it exciting?”

“Well, yes,” Sala said, because she couldn’t think of what else to call it, though exciting didn’t seem to cover the matter—not by half, not by an iota.

“Was the ambassador hard on Hera?” Ava asked, then, moving on to matters closer to home. Sala thought she could have sat and speculated about the report from Scandia for hours, but she knew Ava would have gotten impatient with her if she had.

So she nodded in response to her roommate’s question, then said, “Have you seen June this morning?” June was Hera’s roommate, a lovely girl of African phenotype. The Belian ambassador had requested Hera by herself, so June had had the night off.

“She left right before you came in,” Ava answered. “Do you want me to go tell her to fetch Hera and take care of her?”

“Not yet,” Sala said. “He wasn’t done when I came to breakfast.”

Ava’s eyes went wide. “Really? But he’s so old! How can he stay up all night like that?” She giggled. “I mean, I know the pills keep that part up all night, but still.”

“I doubt he gets the chance to punish girls at home,” Sala said. “To have Hera over his knee with her panties down probably makes him want to take his time.” She felt her nose twitch, and knew Ava would see that Sala was thinking of Ava’s own sweet young bottom. Sala had been chosen head girl because of her switchy tendencies—it usually gave her insights into the minds of guests that Ava generally wouldn’t have had.

“Just over his knee?” Ava asked a little coyly. Now Sala could see her erotic responsiveness start to take over. All the girls of the Guesthouse shared that characteristic. If Sala and Ava weren’t careful, they would end up spending the next hour in bed, and Sala might well get a whipping from the director for that.

“I have to check the tape,” Sala answered, “but he definitely caned her too—I could see the welts on the monitor. And he requested a whipping block, so I imagine he strapped her down for it.”

Ava shuddered, but Sala knew that despite the tremor of fear, if she told her roommate to stand up and lower her panties, and probed between her legs—as Sala often did in the capacity of Ava’s superior—she would find the girl’s bare pussy wet at the thought. Like Ava, Sala wore light green synth-silk underwear, just bra and panties. Other girls around the refectory wore the same underwear, but in other colors.

When a guest made his or her selection of the girls, of course, he or she would also select the lingerie the girl or girls he chose would wear when they came to give pleasure. Until then, the girls wore the colored underwear that the founder and first director of the Guesthouse, Duke Hendrik, had decreed. His Grace had made it very clear that he found it to his liking that his girls should never wear more than underwear, “So that punishment and pleasure are only a moment away.”

“Are we on duty tonight?” Ava asked.

“I think so.” Sala cast her mind to the duty roster as she had formulated it the day before. “The ambassador is with us for another night. He’ll probably select Bersana.”

Ava nodded. Bersana was a redhead, like Hera—the Celtic A phenotype, while Sala was Celtic B, with black hair and striking blue eyes.

“We have a trade delegation from Earth coming—probably ten of them. If it’s that many, we’ll probably get picked.”

“Earth!” Ava said. “Have you ever fucked a man from Earth, Sala?”

Sala shook her head. She couldn’t remember visitors from the human home world in her five years at the Guesthouse.

Ava lowered her voice a little. “Are they, you know, big?”

Sala giggled. “I don’t think so. I’ve heard they’re kind of boring, actually.”

Ava pouted. Sala said, “Come on, Ava. I know you think you want to be fucked by a huge cock, but let me tell you, it hurts.” Two years ago, before she and Ava were roommates, Sala and her old roommate Oprona had been chosen by an enormous warrior from the barbarian world of Trestrimar—enormous in every way. Though really the experience had driven both Sala and Oprona wild with submissive arousal, Sala didn’t want Ava’s envy to eat her up quite as much as it seemed to, and so she always pretended the considerable discomfort the warrior’s cock had caused her represented the whole of her memory.

Ava never completely believed her, though, it always seemed. She retained her pout, though it twitched now slightly to the side of her face. “Wanna fist me?” she said, looking down at her empty breakfast plate.

“Ava,” Sala said. Of course she wanted to fist her roommate: the screamy moans Ava gave forth when Sala opened her hand like a flower, then clenched it again, inside Ava’s sweet pussy, were some of Sala’s favorite sounds in the world. But she had work to do. The director really did rule her with an iron rod—or a rattan one, at any rate.

“I know, I know. Do you think Hera will do it, if I help June take care of her? Or June?”

Sala laughed. “Of course, honey.”