Revenge of The Flinker
by Susan Strict
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2007 Susan Strict
Published by Strict Publishing International
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Chapter One
The Flinker and the Helmwade
Deep in the Helmwade something was stirring.
The surface of the huge landlocked sea showed no indication of what was happening far below. The dazzling white light from the planet’s two suns glinted on the glistening helmwater as they rose towards their midday position almost directly overhead. A gentle breeze blew across the sea’s surface, creating ripples that merged and became crashing waves in the shallows of the sandy beaches. Nothing appeared to be at all out of the ordinary.
The flinker checked the monitors of the equipment he had assembled on the low rise near the edge of the Helmwade. Shading his eyes against the glare, he peered out over the sparkling helmwater. He could see nothing new, but the screens before him told another story.
Briefly he looked across the bay to the great white house that stood empty, tall and imposing some distance back from where the waves broke on the sand. Twice now he had panicked when he had seen the avtoflets from the Patrol at the house. The first time was shortly after the owner of the house had appeared with a friend and a whole fleet of avtoflets in the markings of the Patrol had turned up. He had thought then that he had been discovered, and was expecting that any moment the ‘flets would rise up and head for the far side of the bay where he lived. It was a great relief to see them disappear the way they had come. The second time was only a few weeks previously, and on that occasion he knew they were looking for him. Now, he had made sure his equipment was well camouflaged and no one would notice it from more than a short distance away.
He wished he could have picked a different location for his equipment, but he knew that this was where he would receive the most accurate readings and where, if his calculations were correct, he would see the proof of his theories emerge.
There was a dull bleeping from the machinery. Hastily he silenced it, and watched the pinpoints of light on the screen with growing excitement. Every second more of them were appearing, and already there were thousands. Soon they merged into one solid mass of light that ebbed and flowed amoeba-like in front of him. They were coming, just as he had hoped they would.
* * * * *
It was years ago he had made his first plans. It was nothing more than an accident that had sparked the original thought, and even then he had no idea that it might turn into something so substantial and so important.
He had always been an inventor. Many would have regarded him as a recluse, living as he did on the shores of the Helmwade far from centres of population and away from others of his kind. He, unlike the flinkers of the towns and villages, was never summoned to a scortium to be used and abused by the gatherings of females for their pleasure. In his youth, shortly after reaching the age when all flinkers were put on the lists at their local benglions, he had experienced several full scortiums with an odd feeling of excitement and fear as the females in the room smuntered him in turn, almost suffocating him many times. When finally the scramper had squinked his slambold, bouncing up and down violently and enthusiastically until he sprungled in a screech of climactic ecstasy, he knew that this was not the life he wanted.
He went away. Unusually, for none of his race was accustom to travelling unless it was absolutely essential, he found his new home many miles away over the mountains by the edge of the Helmwade. It had attracted him from the moment he saw it. That vast mass of fluid, so often perfectly tranquil and yet constantly in motion even when fierce storm winds were not lashing its little waves into mountainous walls of helmwater, made him feel he needed to stay close to it. It was so unlike the rivers and streams he had known near his first home, and so unlike the rivers and streams that flowed from the hills and mountains to meet it.
Water it was, and yet it was something more than water. It took him only minutes to find that it was undrinkable, and only another few hours to discover he could neither float nor swim in it. Something had changed in the structure of the water molecules, altering them into a unique, fluid substance that had the appearance and many of the properties of water but which had become a totally different substance altogether.
Creatures lived in the Helmwade. The flinker saw fishlike head and tails occasionally appearing above its surface and, more rarely, actually jumping clear of it to fall back with a splash. He set about catching them.
He was very hesitant when he caught his first. He had heard that they were edible, and indeed were regarded as a great delicacy. Several of his friends had made trips to the Helmwade when they were younger and more adventurous, returning with stories of the dozens of fish they had caught and cooked on open fires by the side of the helmwater.
He examined the fish. Immediately he noticed the obvious difference from any normal fish. It had no gills. Instead it had nostrils much like any land animal, except that these were rather larger in proportion to the fish’s size.
It tasted fine when he had cooked it, although he carefully discarded any parts he was not entirely sure about when he gutted and cleaned it.
Catching fish quickly became the flinker’s main pastime. It was considerably easier than trying to catch or trap the few land animals that lived around the shores of the Helmwade and that were fit to eat. Many were not and, the flinker discovered after trapping, preparing, cooking and tasting several of them, so horrible in flavour that he would have hesitated to eat them even if he were starving. The alternative of a diet of fruit, nuts and the numerous greenish edible plants was far from his liking.
As a natural progression from standing on the shore or in the shallow water that sucked at his legs as if trying to drag him deeper, the flinker’s thoughts turned to making a boat. There was plenty of raw material in the woods at the foot of the mountains, and he had all the necessary tools.
It was very hard work. Although timber was plentiful, to construct a boat large enough to carry him and stable enough not to risk capsizing on the swell of the Helmwade was a mammoth task for anyone working alone. It took him six weeks.
Finally, he dragged the boat to the edge of the Helmwade, struggling to move it as it became bogged down in the wet sand. He pushed it into the water and jumped in, pulling frantically with the makeshift oars to move the boat out over the breaking waves to the calmer water beyond. To give himself better leverage, he wedged his feet under the seat he had constructed at the rear of the boat.
Just as he was congratulating himself on his success, he noticed the boat sinking lower and lower in the water. It had seemed buoyant at first, but now it went down like a stone, taking him with it. He panicked as the water closed over his head and fought to free his feet that were now trapped under the rear seat.
The water was not particularly deep, and he was not too far from the shore. Even so, with his feet still trapped he was being dragged towards the bottom with no hope of being able to reach the fresh air just inches over his head. The boat bumped onto the bed of the Helmwade and settled comfortably in a cloud of sand that caught the sunlight and sparkled like a thousand fireflies all around him. Still he held his breath, and still he could not free himself.
His lungs felt as though they were bursting. A dizziness came over him. The water became darker as though he was descending further and further into the depths, yet he knew he was already as far down as he could go and the darkening was because he was steadily losing consciousness.
It was the end. He gave up. He knew he would die, and he stopped struggling. Peacefully, he opened his mouth and took a deep breath that he knew would fill his lungs with water and speed the inevitable.
Nothing happened. No water entered his body either through his mouth or his nose. It was as if the helmwater had formed an invisible membrane over his face to prevent anything entering, and yet something was entering. He could breathe.
He had no idea what was happening. He only knew he could breathe, and now there was plenty of time for him to free his feet without the rush and panic he had felt as he was convinced he was about to drown. Later, in the days and weeks that followed, as his experiments became more and more complex, he would start to identify the complex molecules that made up the helmwater, and only then he would discover the vast quantities of free oxygen loosely held within each molecule. Now, however, all he felt was an overwhelming feeling of relief that turned rapidly to peace and contentment.
His feet came free from under the seat without difficulty. He stepped out of the boat, mildly surprised that he had not immediately started to float towards the surface of the Helmwade. The helmwater was warm, moving slightly around him as though caressing him and assuring him he was safe and secure. Although it did not lift him upwards it pulled at his legs and pressed him gently backward. He felt sleepy, dreamy, and as the helmwater embraced him with its caresses he wanted nothing more than to give in to its insistent touch and to let it take him.
His feet rose from the sandy seabed, and his head and shoulders slipped backwards. His eyes closed in complete comfort as he fell slowly towards the sand.
His head hit one of the oars, still in its rowlock protruding over the side of the boat. It jolted his eyes open at once and he looked around in disbelieve, startled to realise what had nearly happened and determined to fight the persistent feeling of sleepiness that would not go away.
He looked in each direction, desperately trying to work out which way the shore lay. It was, he knew, not very far from him and yet it felt as though it was the other side of the planet. Step by step, forcing himself to go forward, he made his way in the direction he was sure the boat had come.
He was right. It took less than thirty steps, each one a major effort, before his head broke clear of the surface of the helmwater. Even now the helmwater seemed reluctant to let him go. It pulled at his legs, impeding his movements. He fought it, eventually kicking the last remnants of it from his feet as he collapsed on the sand.
For several minutes he did not move. Finally, he sat up and stared at the sparkling Helmwade. It really seemed as though it had wanted to keep him. He shuddered. His mind had played odd tricks, he decided. It must have been the shock of nearly drowning that had done it, although being able to breathe under the helmwater had definitely been real and not in his imagination. Without a doubt his mind had played odd tricks, and yet there was something, more than something quite unnatural about the Helmwade. He understood now why so many people had disappeared on fishing trips to the Helmwade, and why there were so many peculiar stories about it. It made no sense. It needed further investigation.
Chapter Two
Shardine - The End of The Scortium
Far from the Helmwade, Shardine awoke and stretched uncomfortably. There was still no sign of her clothes. The flimsy gown they had given her was far too small, hardly coming to below her hips and leaving a gap at the back even when she tied the strings behind her as tightly as she could. The long chain between the metal band riveted onto her ankle and the bed frame rattled noisily as she moved. She looked at it unhappily for a moment, before the pains between her legs once again became the focus of her attention as stabbing spasms of agony shot through her.
She had no idea what the Council intended to do with her now. Her punishment, which under normal circumstances she was unlikely to have survived, had been cut short before it was even half way through. Perhaps they would decide that it must be continued to its inevitable end, or perhaps her fate was to be kept here in this small stone room chained to the bed for the rest of her life. It made little difference to her. Given the choice of those two options, Shardine would probably have preferred the former, which at least would have put an end to it all and in a way that, however bizarre and painful it might be, was somehow so appropriate.
It had been with the eighty-ninth flinker that everything had happened. As she lay naked, securely yet comfortably restrained with her legs wide apart at that extraordinary scortium in the Council chamber, she had known there was a real possibility her body would not able to take the repeated extremes of grasmic shuddering. However much she tried to avoid it, the reaction to each flinker as he thrust his slambold into her again and again was instinctive and automatic for Shardine, and she knew there was every likelihood that sooner or later sheer exhaustion would finish her. Had she survived this, there was no chance that she would live through the airless smuntering from every one of those hundreds of matogles, particularly when the flinkers were continuing to squink her and send her into more and more fits of grasmic.
Less than half of the flinkers had squinked her. A corner of her brain had kept count, and she knew it was the eighty-ninth who approached her and thrust into her without any sort of preliminary. The matogle stood by with the tube, ready to release the warm water jet to clean and refresh her as soon as the flinker had finished. Shardine closed her eyes and braced herself as well as she could, feeling the familiar quivering inside her rising towards the grasmic shudder, and hoping this would be one of the milder ones and that the flinker would sprungle quickly.
It was not a gentle one. The flinker went on and on, not so much thrusting as gyrating at her. The pre-grasmic shuddering started in Shardine’s chest and worked its way downward as usual. Her arms and legs tingled in a way she had rarely experienced, which was all the more unusual because it was something that might be expected to happen when she had not squinked for a long time and certainly not after having just been squinked by eighty-eight enthusiastic flinkers. The full force of the grasmic hit her with an explosion of bright lights in her head and a convulsion of her muscles that would have thrown her from the padded table if she had not been securely restrained. An irresistible force went through her, needing desperately to bring her legs together, to grip and hold the flinker to her with her arms around his body, squeezing and clutching as her body writhed and bucked on him.
Restrained as she was, that force had no outlet. Shardine screamed, and felt her muscles tighten on the slambold still gyrating in her. The screaming went on, and it was several minutes before she realised it was not her voice screaming. She had a deep, agonising pain between her legs, much deeper and far more severe than the pain she had been suffering from having been squinked eighty-eight times already with no more than a break of a few seconds between each.
There was pandemonium in the Chamber. The flinkers had all risen to their feet while most of those in line to take their turn had drawn back and now stood helpless and confused near the front row of tiered seats. Many of the matogles had rushed forward and gathered around the table on which Shardine lay and from the end of which the flinker’s cries echoed around the room.
“Let him go,” a matogle ordered Shardine.
Shardine opened her eyes, staring up at the high ceiling without seeing anything.
“Let him go,” the matogle ordered again.
“Who?” Shardine murmured.
The matogle slapped her. “Let him go now.”
The pain between Shardine’s legs worsened and deepened. She gasped and groaned in agony. The cries of the flinker became louder.
“Separate them,” came a commanding voice from somewhere at the back of the room.
Two matogles came forward and while one tried to pull the flinker from Shardine, the other released the restraints around Shardine’s ankles and tried to pull her legs further apart. Both Shardine and the flinker screamed with pain, and the grip of her muscles on him tightened still more.
As soon as the two matogles released the flinker and let go of Shardine’s legs, Shardine experienced a most peculiar sensation in her muscles. There was movement between her legs, although she was sure it was not the flinker’s slambold. It felt as if her body was chewing on the flinker’s slambold, trying to take it more deeply into her and to strengthen her grip on it by sucking it in. The flinker carried on screaming and trying to pull away. Shardine lost consciousness.
* * * * *
“You are awake again?”
The voice from the door startled Shardine. She turned round, the chain on her ankle rattling noisily once more. She had not heard key turn in the lock nor the sound of the door opening. When she last tried it, the door had been firmly locked and was definitely too solid for her to force it open. She wondered why they had bothered to lock it, because the chain attached to her ankle would have prevented her going more than a short distance outside her room even if the door had been open.
“Are you feeling better?”
“I hurt,” Shardine told the vixling who stood in the doorway as if a little fearful of entering the room properly. Although she was definitely the age of a vixling and did not yet have the more mature features of a matogle, she had the bearing and the efficient look that usually only came as age took the wild immaturity of youth into the responsibility of real adulthood.
She wore the uniform of a healer, pure white and businesslike, with knee-length white boots. It was an outfit that Shardine particularly liked and had always wanted to wear. There was something indefinably exciting about it, something that expressed control and efficiency without the self-seeking dominance of females at a normal scortium.
“I have a lot of pain down here,” Shardine indicated the area between her legs. “Could you take a look, please? There must be something you can do.”
The healer shook her head. “I’m not allowed to go near you on my own,” she said, with a trace of disappointment in her voice. “You are far too dangerous, according to the Council. I’m not even supposed to talk to you really. I just wanted to see what you were like. You seem quite normal to me.”
“Why am I locked in here?” Shardine wanted to know.
“You are a prisoner of the Council, of course.”
“Yes I know that, but why is the door locked? I’m chained to the bed anyway. Couldn’t the door be open, so at least I can see what’s going on outside and I can talk to someone occasionally.”
The healer hesitated. “You are not supposed to talk to anyone. We all had instructions. There must be three of us here when there is any treatment to be done or when we bring your food, and anything you say is supposed to be reported at once word for word.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Shardine protested. “Do I look that dangerous?”
“No,” admitted the healer, “And that’s why I am talking to you on my own. But that’s not the main reason the door is locked. The Council say you might be in danger from the flinkers so it’s locked to keep them out, not to keep you in.”
“In danger from the flinkers?” echoed Shardine in surprise. “How could there be any danger from them? Flinkers just do what they’re told, don’t they? At worst they run away.”
The healer avoided Shardine’s questioning eyes. “I wouldn’t know,” she said evasively, “I just follow orders.”
“You don’t follow orders,” Shardine pointed out, “Or you wouldn’t be here talking to me.”
“I have to go.” The healer stepped back and shut the door quietly and carefully. Shardine heard the key turn in the lock. She lay back on her bed in exasperation. The cramps in her stomach started once more, making her curl up in pain and, for the moment, making her forget the healer’s extraordinary assertion that she might be in danger from the flinkers.
As the pains subsided, Shardine once again puzzled over what the healer had said. How could she possibly be in danger from the flinkers? At the same time, she became steadily more and more angry when she thought about everything she had discovered over the last few weeks.
Society, the natural order of things, had all been turned on its head. Everyone knew that there was only one order, one proper and correct structure for society. No one, if asked, would have actually said that it was all based on the satisfaction of female sexual desire, but in reality it was precisely that.
Males, called “flinkers” when they were submissives and engaged in satisfying females which was most of the time, had virtually no part to play in society except when they were called to a scortium. At this gathering, one flinker would be restrained naked on a padded table in the middle of a large building called a benglion, and the gathering of females would satisfy their urges on his defenceless body.
It was not quite that simple. Ritual demanded that only one female, the scramper, was allowed to actually squink the flinker’s slambold. This female also had the responsibility of making sure the flinker behaved himself and made a proper effort while every other female present smuntered his face one at a time, until each was fully satisfied. Then and only then could the scramper squink him until he sprungled, and with any luck the scramper would become rebendett and give birth some months later.
This was, as far as Shardine had known until recently, the only way that things were done and the only way they should be done. Now she was angry, because she had discovered that hidden from the general population was a whole world of alternatives that offered a different approach for flinkers and females alike if their sexual preferences did not fit in with the conventional activities.
For Shardine, her discovery came at a price. Her freedom was gone, and the verdict of the Council for her rebellion had amounted to a death sentence from which she had only been saved, so far, by a remarkable turn of events and the unexpected reaction of her own body. Her earlier discovery that her own sexuality was far from the norm might have helped her find a proper niche for herself. If she had not already embarked on a course that put her squarely against the efforts of the Council to handle differences without alerting or upsetting the general population, it might have been totally different. Perhaps the Patrol would have eventually taken her away, explained that she was not unique, and segregated her from general society and let her go on with her activities in the company of those with similar and complementary desires. Yet, she had to fight it. She had to rebel, and to try to encourage others to rebel against what she saw as a dangerous and unfair system that could destroy not only their society but also the whole of their race.
Was she wrong? Should she have left the situation alone and gone along with it all? Had it been wrong to try to protect the flinkers, to try to find out more about them so that some solution could be found to the dwindling numbers available for scortiums?
Rather, thought Shardine, the Council should have made its actions public so that everyone knew there were other not so submissive flinkers and females of all ages whose interests extended much further than smuntering flinkers. Keeping it all so secret made no sense at all to Shardine, and she would certainly not have ended here, chained to this bed under sentence of death, if she had known when she started what she knew now.
She was angry, very angry as she thought about it. She hardly heard the door when it opened again.
Three females in healers’ uniforms entered the room. Two were definitely matogles. The other was the vixling that Shardine had seen earlier.
All three came straight over to Shardine, not hesitating in the doorway as the vixling had done previously. She swung her legs from the bed and stood up as they approached.
“We are here to help you wash and clean yourself,” announced the oldest of the three.
“I can manage that perfectly well on my own,” Shardine told her. “I don’t need your help.”
“Yes you do,” insisted the healer, “You will still be very weak, and the bathroom is very small. We don’t want you falling over and hurting yourself. It is our responsibility to keep you safe, so we will help you wash here and you won’t have to make the effort to go to the bathroom.”
“I don’t need to be washed,” insisted Shardine, but already one of them had undone the strings behind her holding her flimsy gown together. It fell to the floor.
“Look here. This is ridiculous,” Shardine protested as the two matogles gently but firmly forced her back onto the bed.
“Do be good and don’t resist us,” one of them told her, “You mustn’t weaken yourself. We need you to make a full recovery. Just relax.”
Shardine had no intention of relaxing and letting the three women wash her. With all the strength she could muster she swung a punch at the matogle who had spoken. It connected squarely on the matogle’s jaw, but she had been right. Shardine was weak, and the punch had little effect.
The two matogles held Shardine’s arms, pressing her firmly to the bed. They instructed the vixling to fill a bowl of warm water from the bathroom and to wash Shardine carefully, making sure she was dried with a soft towel as each part of her body was cleaned.
As Shardine struggled uselessly to try and free herself from the matogles’ grip, the vixling set about her task. She was careful and methodical, taking great care that no water was spilled onto the bed and, Shardine thought, being unnecessarily thorough with the area between Shardine’s legs. Shardine squirmed and swore.
Finally they released her.
“That wasn’t so bad, was it?” the matogle asked her as the two of them let go of her.
“Squink off,” replied Shardine venomously, sitting up and once again aiming a punch at her face. The matogle dodged easily and the three of them retreated to a safe distance.
“We will see you later. We will bring you some food in a few hours. Try to sleep. You really do need proper rest to help your body recover.”
They left, closing and locking the door behind them. Shardine threw herself back on the bed in despair and lay there with one arm over her face. She did not even bother to put on the useless gown, leaving it in a crumpled heap on the floor.
Chapter Three
The Flinker - The Boat
It was two years before the flinker was ready to attempt another trip onto the Helmwade. Fishing from the shore produced all he could eat, but his inventive mentality demanded that he should not be beaten and he was determined to find a way. He was convinced that he would spend far less time catching fish if only he could do it from out on the Helmwade rather than stuck at the edge of it.
The materials he needed were not available anywhere near the Helmwade, and even with his most inventive ideas he was unable to manufacture them on his own. Reluctantly, he decided to use his avtoflet and to risk a visit to one of the main towns where he knew there would be many factories producing materials he would be able to use. He would not be able to obtain exactly what he really wanted, but he was sure that with a little thought he would be able to put something together once he had the basics.
It took several visits before he had assembled the collection of items that he hoped would work. Slowly the new design took shape.
Without the intense heat of the two suns beating down on the planet, his design would never have been possible. He could think of no way to produce an unpowered craft to sail on the Helmwade, simply because the conventional theories of vessels floating once their weight had been displaced in the fluid under them just did not apply on helmwater. Instead, he worked on his own design, basing it on the systems used by the avtoflet.
Of course, the avtoflet design was far too heavy to be of any use on helmwater or even on ordinary water. The jets on the underside of the vehicle depended on having a hard surface beneath them in order to create the lift needed to raise the avtoflet from the road and then to propel it along. The banks of solar cells that made up the vehicle’s body and took advantage of the powerful sunlight did, as he rapidly discovered, generate a huge amount of power that could be stored relatively easily, but the storage batteries were immensely heavy. After all, he told himself, a ‘flet could run all night at top speed without the power being totally discharged, and his requirements were much simpler.
His first experiments were with small models, and proved to be none too successful. The helmwater simply parted as the downward force of the jets touched it, and the tiny vehicle ended up at the bottom of the Helmwade within seconds, even faster than the sinking of his more conventional boat. He tried everything he could think of. The greater the downward force of the jets, the quicker his little boats sank. He even had the brainwave of installing an inflatable skirting all around the edge of the boat, hoping it would ride the surface of the Helmwade on a cushion of air. It did, for about thirty seconds, and then slowly descended into the helmwater.
The breakthrough came by accident. It was his tenth attempt, and this time he had installed four powerful jets pointing backwards, in the hope that his boat could skip across the surface of the helmwater as a flat stone might when thrown at the right angle onto a pond by some young flinker.
His boat was top heavy, and the jets were too powerful. It shot away from the shore at high speed, scarcely touching the surface of the helmwater. Before it had gone more than a hundred yards the jet tubes had worked loose on their mountings, and the miniature boat had started to bounce in huge leaps, which in a full-sized boat would surely have flung its occupants out into the Helmwade immediately. It bounced higher and higher from the surface of the Helmwade until inevitably it capsized, its jet tubes disappearing completely under the helmwater.
The flinker, now sure it was a complete failure, turned away to walk wearily back to his workshop. He had taken only two or three paces when he realised he could still hear the roar of his boat’s engines. He stopped to look, and was amazed by what he saw. The boat was still on the surface of the Helmwade, upside down, and racing around in erratic circles.
It took him several minutes to work it out, and by that time the power in the boat’s miniature capacitor had run out. With the small bank of solar cells facing downward into the helmwater it was not charging the powerpack, and as the jets spluttered and died, the boat disappeared.
The flinker rushed forward into the Helmwade. He needed the boat. He needed to find out why it had worked; why it had stayed on the surface until the power had run out. As he ran towards where he had last seen the boat, the helmwater became deeper and deeper. It was up to his chest before he came to his senses and struggled back to the shore.
He did not really need to find the boat. He knew. And it was so simple that he could not imagine why he had not thought of it first. Instead of trying to use the motors to blast air from the jet tubes, he should have been trying to blast helmwater through them. He did not need to blast anything downward into the water; he merely needed to provide sufficient horizontal movement so that the boat kept going in that direction. Excitedly, he headed to the workshop.
In fact, it was not quite that straightforward, and his final version of the boat was rather different. He was right in his thoughts that the key was horizontal power and movement, but with a larger boat he needed something more. That something came to him in a vague memory of once studying the basics of aerodynamics. The boat needed wings.
Once correctly shaped, the flow of the helmwater over the wings of the boat created by the forward motion of the water jets underneath, would produce lift. Exactly as an aircraft could fly in air if correctly shaped and powered no matter how heavy it was, his boat would fly through the Helmwade, prevented from sinking not by buoyancy but by the lift from its wings.
It was something of a worry to him that he was relying on the forward motion of his underwater jets to keep afloat, and that any failure would mean disaster. He spent many weeks working on duplicate systems that could automatically cut in if the main jets failed. The final plans for the boat became larger and more complicated as he added more and more features and safeguards. The floor of his workshop and his small home became littered with drawings, sketches and calculations. He worked at it feverishly, desperate to get it just right.
Finally it was finished. The plans were complete. Now he could start on the build. He sat on the sand by the Helmwade, relaxing for the first time in months and staring out across the Helmwater.
There was a strong breeze, as there nearly always was near the Helmwade. It was cooling, comforting, although the air was as warm as if it had just blown across a scorching desert. The flinker was, for once, not thinking about his boat nor about what he might do with it once it was finished. His thoughts were far away, drifting around the town where he had grown up and where he had once been the flinker at the town’s benglion when, having reached maturity, he was summoned to his first scortium.
He had himself chosen this solitary life at the side of the Helmwade. He had not been forced into it, yet he did miss having others around him. Worse, he realised, he missed the females. He had not thought it to be an important part of his life. He had no particular wish to be used and abused by the young and sadistic vixlings, to have the powerful, mature and businesslike matogles grinding themselves down onto him, or to hear the vicious cackles of pleasure from the nagolds as they satisfied their ageing lusts on his defenceless body.
He shuddered, but as he did he knew his body was becoming aroused at his thoughts of the females, however distasteful some of their actions might be. There had been nothing further from his mind over the past months, but now he knew that sooner or later he would need to return and to submit to the indignity, the pain and the danger of a scortium. As far as he knew, there was no other way in which he could have physical contact with a female.
He tried to put the thoughts from his mind, shading his eyes with his hands and looking out over the Helmwade once more. He did not expect to see anything other than the sparkling helmwater, the rippling wavelets and the deep swell that turned into breaking waves as it reached the shallows near the shore.
To his surprise, the flinker thought he could see something far out on the Helmwade. He stood up, staring more intently at the small far away object that appeared to be right on the surface of the helmwater.
It looked like a flaplock. As it drew closer, the flinker become and more and more certain it was a flaplock, although not a species he had ever seen before.
This flaplock was somewhat unusual. Unlike the aquatic flaplocks that the flinker had often seen calmly floating on water on rivers and ponds, paddling frantically with their webbed feet, this flaplock appeared to be standing on the helmwater with his wings outstretched. As it drew closer, the flinker could see that the flaplock’s wing feathers protruded at right angles instead of being slanted, presenting a broad surface to the wind which effectively blew him along. It was indeed standing on the helmwater, or appeared to be standing on it, which seemed to the flinker to be an impossibility.
As the flaplock came into the rougher water near the shore, it started to flap its wings. As it did, its feathers resumed the normal angle and shape of a flaplock’s wing, providing the lift it needed to raise it into the air.
It flew straight at the flinker, gaining height and passing some way over the flinker’s head. Looking up, the flinker saw the flaplock’s huge feet, now swept back and tucked behind the creature as it soared through the air.
As he watched it disappear into the distance, the flinker knew he had the solution to his problem of powering the boat without the need for multiple engines. He wondered why he had not thought of it before. It was simple, but it only came to him when he saw the flaplock’s huge feet that were almost identical in shape to the wings of his boat.
Just as the flaplock had used his wings to provide the forward movement to keep him afloat on the surface of the Helmwade, the flinker could make a sail for the boat. He would still need his jets, for there were times when the wind over the Helmwade was little more than a whisper, but now the whole design could be much simpler, lighter, and easier to put together.
Chapter Four
Shardine and The Healers
Shardine was half asleep when the door opened once more and then closed quietly. She did not look up. She assumed they were bringing her food, although she had not thought it was more than an hour at the most since the three of them had been in to wash her.
“Are you asleep?”
It was the young healer’s voice. Shardine recognised it at once. She did not open her eyes.
“No. Just leave the food. I’ll eat it later.”
“It’s not time for the food yet. That will be at least two hours.”
Shardine opened her eyes and stared at the vixling who was standing nervously by the door.
“Why are you here if it’s not time for the food? Can’t you all just leave me alone?”
The vixling shifted her weight from one foot to the other and back repeatedly. She looked anxious and more than a little frightened.
“I just wanted to see you were all right,” she said. “I’d like to talk to you. It must be awful being on your own and not knowing what’s going to happen.”
“I’m all right,” said Shardine irritably, closing her eyes again. “I don’t need your concern.”
The vixling turned and reached for the door handle, and then changed her mind. She walked a few steps forward towards Shardine.
Shardine opened her eyes again. “You still here?” she said.
“I...” The vixling walked forward another few steps. She was almost at Shardine’s bed. She was staring down at Shardine’s naked body.
“I think you are quite nice,” she said hesitantly with an attempt at a smile.
“No I’m not. I’m the nasty, anti-social, danger to society who might corrupt the minds of impressionable young vixlings,” said Shardine sarcastically. “Haven’t they told you how I wanted to overthrow the system and change the whole course of history with my perverted ideas?”
The vixling’s smile faded. Her lips quivered, and the faintest traces of tears appeared in her eyes. She turned swiftly, and before Shardine could say any more she had rushed from the room.
Shardine shrugged and closed her eyes once more.
It was about an hour later when Shardine awoke with the distinct impression that someone had just touched her lightly. She lay motionless with her eyes closed, listening intently.
There was definitely someone in the room. She could hear the faint noise of someone breathing very close to her. That someone was trying hard to be very quiet, and to move extremely slowly so as not to create any disturbance.
Shardine went on listening without moving or opening her eyes. She heard a rustle of clothing, and then the breathing quickened. There was the sound of movement, rapid, rhythmical movement that became faster as the breathing also became faster.
Shardine opened her eyes and sat up. The vixling squealed in surprise.
“Quiet!” Shardine told her sharply. “Do you want everyone to hear?”
“I’m sorry. I thought you were asleep. I was only...” The vixling backed away straightening her uniform, her face bright red.
“I know exactly what you were doing,” Shardine told her. “And I don’t have a problem with that. I’m just rather surprised.”
“I wasn’t,” the vixling protested. “I was only... Because I wouldn’t... It wouldn’t be right... Not in my position. Not with you. I just looked and...”
The vixling’s words were not making any sense, but Shardine understood perfectly. “It isn’t anything to be embarrassed about,” she insisted. “Although you might want to be a little more careful. Even if I had been asleep I could have easily woken at any moment, and if it were someone else other than me, you could have been in real trouble. I don’t mind at all, but that’s not the point.”
The vixling was still backing away half a step at a time towards the door. “It’s not... It couldn’t be anyone else... I just... You are particularly...”
She reached the door, backing into it with a thud before she realised. Without taking her eyes from Shardine, she reached behind her for the handle and fled into the corridor.
Despite her predicament, Shardine actually smiled. Somehow, it was comforting to know that there were others in all parts of society whose sexual urges were no less powerful than Shardine’s own and who, like Shardine, did not conform to convention. Similarly, it was satisfying to see that such urges caused so much concern and embarrassment when they were revealed. Although it was just one person, one vixling, it was a vindication of Shardine’s own actions and her desire to bring about change. If such feelings were present here, where the workers should have been some of the most trusted and respectable anywhere, then surely it ran throughout society? Certainly this vixling’s particular desires were not the same as Shardine’s own, yet that made it all the more important. It was, as Shardine had told herself so many times, essential for the whole of society to recognise and accept that varying desires and needs were common, natural, and ran throughout the population. Until this happened, many people would continue to live in absolute misery when there were perfectly good and reasonable alternatives for them. It really was totally unacceptable to continue to allow the vast majority of the public to believe that their urges were unnatural and should be suppressed, or to force them outside normal society into the special secret groups it appeared the Council had set up.
Shardine’s anger returned. If she was ever released from here, she vowed she would fight for what she knew was needed. If that meant she risked further imprisonment or worse, then she was quite prepared to take that risk.
She shut her eyes, not to sleep now but to plan what she might do if she were ever free to do it.
The door crashed open again.
“Food,” announced a uniformed matogle.
“Stick it,” suggested Shardine.
“That’s not nice. You need to eat,” the matogle told her. “After you’ve finished, we’ll prepare you for bed.”
“I don’t want to eat, and I don’t need you to prepare me for anything. I’m in bed now, so I don’t know what the squink you think you are going to do,” said Shardine obstinately.
“We are doing our best to look after you.” The matogle tried to pacify her as she approached with a tray of food. “You are not in bed, you are just on it. We will try to find you some more comfortable bedding and something nicer to put on.”
“I’m just fine as I am,” Shardine told her. “I’m just a perfect, contented, perverted enemy of the State.”
The matogle stood by the bed looking down at Shardine. “Please try to be good. It will be so much nicer for all of us.”
“Like what you’re looking at?” enquired Shardine sarcastically. “Want a quick smunter while you’re here, or perhaps a squink. I’m an expert, you know. I’ve had more squinks than you will ever have in a lifetime.”
She arched her back and opened her legs wide.
“Don’t do that. It’s not at all nice,” the matogle told her. “We need to work together in here.”
“Not nice? It’s very nice,” Shardine screamed at her. “It’s the nicest thing in the world.”
The matogle had bent down towards her, trying to calm and soothe her. Shardine kicked hard at her, catching the tray with her foot and sending the food flying all over the matogle and across the room.
The matogle stepped back hurriedly, wiping food from her face and from the front of her uniform.
“We’ll be back,” she said haughtily. “We’ll be back in half an hour to sort out your bed. If you don’t want the food, you can go hungry.”
“I don’t want anything from any of you,” Shardine told her. “You can all squink off.”
The matogle turned and left without another word. Shardine heard the key turn in the door as it closed behind her.
She thumped the bed angrily. As much as anything, she was annoyed at herself. She knew very well that she was not improving her chances of being released by this sort of behaviour, yet her anger at the whole situation was too strong for her to keep it stifled within her. She pressed her face onto the mattress, and cried silently.
It was only ten minutes before the matogle returned, accompanied this time by the other matogle and the vixling.
“We really cannot have you assaulting the staff all the time,” the matogle told Shardine seriously. “We can’t take the risk of you hurting one of us when we come to check on you during the night, so I’m very sorry but you will have to be restrained.”
“Just you squinking well try,” said Shardine aggressively.
It was a struggle, but they managed it without needing to call for additional assistance. In a few minutes Shardine was strapped to the frame of the bed, her ankles firmly attached to the lower corners and her wrists held out from her sides and buckled with long leather straps onto the bed frame.
Shardine swore continuously at them.
“Don’t get yourself into a state,” the matogle advised her. “You will be much more comfortable if you relax. I think you will be quite warm enough, but you can ask for something over you if you want when someone comes in to check on you. Try to sleep. It will do you good. You will feel better and calmer in the morning.”
They left, turning off the light as they went.
* * * * *
Shardine was asleep. It was after midnight.
She had had some difficulty in sleeping at first. The restraints were not particularly uncomfortable and she did not particularly mind being unable to turn over. The problem was that each time she started to drift into sleep she found her thoughts returning to that awful day of the special scortium in the Council Chamber when she had been sure that she would die. The pain, still with her, when each new flinker thrust into her had been unbearable. That on its own might have been enough for her body to give up the will to live, starting as an unpleasant ache after only the third or fourth flinker, and growing into agony by the time ten of them had satisfied their lusts on her.
Paradoxically, despite the pain, her body had still reacted to each of them. The grasmic had hit her in a shuddering climax with each one of them. It rose within her, unbidden, right up until the eighty-eighth flinker until her body’s totally unexpected reaction with the eighty-ninth had brought the proceedings to a premature end. Every time she remembered it, she shuddered. Yet every time she remembered it she felt those quiet flutterings inside her that told her she had not lost the desire deep within her. Even now, angry as she was and frightening as those memories were, her submissive urges grew and itched as she lay restrained and helpless, goading her anger even as she felt the stirrings of arousal.
But now she slept. She twitched in her sleep as dreams came and went, but she was soundly asleep for the first time in many nights, and on this occasion she did not hear the door open nor the movements of the young healer beside her bed.
Shardine’s dreams turned suddenly to nightmares. She was back at that scortium, restrained by leather straps holding her spread-eagled. The flinkers had finished. Every one of them, nearly two hundred of them, had squinked her as she lay vulnerable and helpless, and her body was as exhausted by her repeated grasmics as it was painful from the repeated thrusting into her by the flinkers.
As the first of the flinkers prepared to start over again, the matogles were queuing. Each of them would smunter her with no watcher and no lifters to save Shardine from suffocation if and when a matogle lost control. Shardine had no doubt that one or more of them would lose control, which was the very reason that all normal scortiums always had the watcher and the lifters.
In Shardine’s nightmare, the first matogle knelt over Shardine and adjusted her position. Slowly, with a tiny sigh of anticipated pleasure, the matogle descended onto Shardine’s face, gripping the sides of her head with her thighs. Dutifully, Shardine stuck out her tongue and tried to lick, but the matogle was not interested in such niceties. She pressed down, sealing Shardine into a fleshy, airless prison from which there could be no escape.
Shardine screamed, but in her dream she could make no sound. She awoke with a start, shivering in fear as the nightmare stayed with her, and at that moment something covered her face exactly as the matogle in her nightmare had covered her. It took her several seconds to realise this was not a part of the same nightmare. For a moment, she was unable to breathe, but only for a moment. Whatever covered her and pressed down onto her, lifted and moaned, rocking backward and forward, and rubbing rather than smothering.
It was a female on top of her, Shardine was sure of that. Tentatively she lifted her head a fraction and pressed her tongue into the wet crevice that rocked back and forth above and onto her. The movement stopped and so did the moaning, replaced by a short, sharp shriek.
Shardine knew at once who it was. She relaxed, letting her head fall back onto her bed. The vixling shuddered, although whether with pleasure, fear or nervousness Shardine could not tell. She seemed to be frozen, an inch or two above Shardine and showed no sign of either continuing or leaving.
Shardine spoke. “You don’t have to stop.”
It was not like the scortium. Certainly, Shardine was bound, restrained and helpless, and certainly the female on top of her could have done anything she wanted. Shardine was completely powerless to stop her. Even so, to Shardine this was no punishment or torture. Despite what had happened to her, her sex drive remained strong, as did her deep desire to be dominated. She was as content to have a female on top of her as she would have been to have a flinker thrusting into her; considerably more so at this moment when she was still in so much discomfort deep between her legs.
Hesitantly, the vixling lowered herself once more, and for several seconds Shardine was unable to breathe. The vixling rocked herself on Shardine’s face, and Shardine sucked at exactly the spot she knew would bring the vixling to her climax more quickly than anything else. She felt the vixling shudder once more, and this time she knew without a doubt that it was a shudder of intense pleasure. The vixling’s movements became faster and more urgent as she approached grasmic, and although there was nothing stimulating Shardine’s pleasure points, she felt her own arousal starting to generate the quivering signals that could so quickly spark her own climax as they flowed through her body.
The grasmic hit the vixling. Undoubtedly it was not her first, but equally surely it was the first she had ever reached with a female underneath her. The intensity of it surprised even Shardine, although she knew very well that her attentions underneath the vixling were focused in a way that a mere flinker could never match. The vixling’s grasmic took her into extreme, uncontrollable muscle spasms that spread throughout her body. Had she been squinking a flinker then undoubtedly the force of those spasms on him would have been at least as powerful as the grip Shardine had unintentionally exerted on that eighty-ninth flinker at the scortium. The vixling’s muscle spasms however, were not limited to that soft, moist area. Her arms and legs too were flailing and then gripping with incredible force. The pressure on the sides of Shardine’s head from the muscles in the vixling’s thighs felt to Shardine powerful enough to crush her skull if it continued. She would have shouted if the vixling had not been totally covering her mouth. This was no brief, fleeting, passing fit of climactic ecstasy. It went on, and on, and on. Crushed and breathless, Shardine could do nothing. The restraints held her inescapably to the bed, and she had no choice but to wait for the vixling to finish. She started to lose consciousness.
Shardine did not quite black out completely. Dimly, she felt the vixling leave her and heard her go out of the room, locking the door as she went. Shardine’s senses took some time to return properly, and as she reached full consciousness again her first desperate urge was to thrust her hands between her legs and satisfy that unfinished arousal the vixling had started.