This is a boy’s adventure tale.
But this is not a boy’s adventure tale prepared by a stuffy old man in a tweed jacket with elbow patches. This is the sort of story that a boy might imagine for himself, filled with action, mystery, a red-hot space queen, and nary a whiff of precious moral instruction.
Well, maybe there is some moral instruction. But this is Reversed Black Maria. Nothing is as it seems, and the thread is broken.
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Author's note: NSFW. Or anywhere, really.
The staterooms were everything that Oskar expected of an Imperial yacht, and more. The bedclothes were silk–in royal and silver, the Empress’s colors–the bath featured a full tub, and the window was big enough to give him an attack of vertigo, especially because it presently gave on the lurid purple accretion disk of a neutron star.
Nevertheless, Oskar lay on the bed and brooded. All of Inna’s suggestions had come to naught. The shower was broken, another victim of decompression. Sleep was unthinkable, and her indecent recommendation left him unfulfilled and seething with angst. It was proof that Miriam had not lied. Oskar’s enslavement was complete. His entire being was reserved for the God-Empress, right down to the seed of his loins. Even if he survived, what kind of life could he hope for?
Oskar tried to get his mind off his predicament by watching the plasma swirl outside. Filters in the window reduced the glare to a tolerable level, but when he looked away the afterimage stuck with him, an undulating pink cloud in the center of his vision. Minutes ticked by, but it faded only a little, and contracted and resolved into a regular shape. After a moment, Oskar realized what it was.
Inna’s luscious, mobile lips.
Oskar blinked. The vision was not dispelled, but changed. Inna’s mouth was eating. He watched entranced as it chewed, a strange emotion swelling inside of him. When she put an apple to her lips, he knew the feeling for what it was. Envy. Burning, crimson envy not of the eater, but of the food. Long did it linger at the tip of her questing tongue, shiny and wet. When she unexpected swallowed it whole, Oskar almost found carnal relief.
“No, no, no!” Oskar yelled, catapulting from the bed. The maddening image was dispelled, but he remained in a frenzy. There had to be a solution. While Inna might doubt the efficacy of science, Oskar was willing to try. He would go and see what the sick bay could offer him, prowling, hungry empress or no. He pulled on a robe and marched out of his cabin, determined to wrest back control of his fate.
The sick bay was two decks below, but when Oskar entered the lift a fey mood gripped him. Instead of “sick bay,” his mouth said “Imperial quarters.” Before he could process the event, the lift opened. He stepped out onto Galaxia’s upper deck, not knowing what to expect. But it was deserted. There was no sound but the reassuring bruit of air circulation and the occasional thump of station-keeping thrusters. Down the corridor, the door of the Empress’s suite hung ajar. Before he knew it, Oskar was inside.
“Inna?” he called softly.
There was only an echo in reply. The linen of the vast, round bed was undisturbed, the inner chambers were dark, and the bath hung open, untenanted. But Inna had been here. Her decadent white carpeting was stained by bloody footprints. The boots that made them lay discarded at the foot of the vanity. Oskar hefted one in his palm. It was gigantic, with an armored instep and an aggressive sole like a climber’s boot. The deep tread was plugged with gelatinous masses of dried blood. Her blood.
Unclean hunger filled Oskar’s soul. He scooped out a clot with his finger and put it in his mouth. The goddess’s blood tasted of salt and burnt rubber. To Oskar’s enchanted palate it was ambrosia. He ate more, and more, and more...
Stop, stop, STOP!!
Oskar cast the boot aside, licked spotlessly clean. He gagged and spat, befouling Inna’s vanity mirror with scarlet splatter.
What is wrong with me?!
Oskar knew the answer before he asked the question. It was magic, irresistible blood magic. Inna was a bona fide goddess–the living, potent antithesis of the inert plaster Kristus that hung in the dusty apse of his mother’s church back home. Inna’s blood was real drink, too. But it did not save.
Bright sigils blazed forth on Oskar’s forehead, plainly visible in the full light of the room. There was no longer even the ghost of hope, or even of forgetfulness. The sacrifice was irrevocably sanctified and marked for service.
What do I do?
Images flashed in his mind’s eye. Inna, draining her huge mug of coffee in a single swallow. Inna, sitting on the floor of Galaxia’s meat locker, bolting great hunks of hard-frozen beef. Inna, ripping out a soldier’s throat with her teeth. Her mannish Adam’s apple bobbed as she swallowed...
There remained a single solution. It was up to Oskar seek it out.
As soon as he made the decision–or was it made for him by Inna’s blood? He wasn’t quite sure–a psychic undertow tugged him into the corridor. By the time Oskar arrived back at the lift, Inna’s indwelling blood had told him exactly what to say. “All the way down, please.”
Moments later, the doors opened on an unfamiliar deck. In contrast to the lush spaces above, it was stark and utilitarian. A single narrow corridor led aft. Oskar took it. He passed banks of lockers, and rooms packed with gargantuan gym equipment. It was here that the Empress forged her Olympian physique. But the gym was empty. Oskar pressed on, blood-drunk and determined.
The corridor opened out into the most improbably sight imaginable aboard a starship: a swimming pool. Oversized in the extreme, it was bordered by a fake black sand beach. Diamonds glinted at Oskar’s feet. But a wisp of steam rose from the roof of a tiki hut on the far side, and a thin sliver of warm light shone forth at the base of the door.
Inna was here.
Oskar only paused for an instant at the threshold of the hut, when the last fragment of his old self screamed in terror. But the blood that drove him ignored it. He threw open the door. The hut was a sauna. A cloud of hot steam boiled out, blinding him.
“Close the door! You’re letting the heat out!” Inna called from within.
Oskar entered, pulling the door shut behind him. He blinked in the humid dimness. The object of his search lay on a bench before him, naked as the day she was born. Oskar caught his breath, for she had the hard, vascular body of a warrior goddess. The bottle he’d given her lay empty on the mat by her dangling hand. She made no move to cover herself, but watched him with hooded eyes.
“I knew you’d come,” she said.
“You did?”
She nodded. Sweat dripped from the point of her chin, and was swallowed by the shadowy valley of her lush cleavage. “Blood calls to blood. I hoped you would be strong enough to resist, but I knew better. It’s an unfair test. None have passed.”
“What happened to the others?”
“One waits for me in Eisenhimmel. The rest are here.” She ran a languid finger around the rim of her navel.
Her inference was obvious. “Will you consume me, too?”
“It is not my will that anyone perish, but will cannot avail us, Oskar. You said it yourself. This is destiny, whether I would have it or not. What do you want?”
“To be free of my enslavement. My flesh and spirit are yours. I have none left for myself.”
“What would you have me do about it?”
The last sparks of Oskar’s free will guttered out. But the desire of Inna’s blood flared into a raging conflagration within him. “Your worst. Fill yourself with me, my goddess and queen!” he shouted, dropping his robe. He stood before her naked and sleek, his body achingly, quiveringly aroused.
Inna licked her lips. “A most worthy offering,” she whispered.
In the next heartbeat he was prone beneath her on the mat. The strength of her body was as an ocean wave, irresistible, crushing, lethal. Her slavering mouth was millimeters from his. It stank of expensive whiskey and raw meat.
He tensed for the kill. “Make it quick.”
“And miss the savor? I think not,” she purred. Her fingers caressed his straining erection. She must have sensed his confusion, for she laughed. “There’s more than one way to fill a goddess, Oskar,” she said.
“Is that...is that how one survived?”
"Rarely, my hunger has been propitiated by a living sacrifice. It depends on the stamina of the offering, and the size of his blood debt. Your debt is small, but a single drop, and you seem energetic enough.” She gave his straining penis a fond squeeze.
I’m doomed, thought Oskar.
Her stomach rumbled like a flight of bombers passing overhead. She bit his lip. “I can bear no more talk,” she gasped. “Satisfy me, Oskar Winter, before it's too late!”
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Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13
