Vasir still felt sometimes as if her head was reeling, even now, months after her first encounter with the Shadow Order. From what she’d been able to observe, her mentor had no such issues, except that if Vasir ever brought the Shadow Order up, Na’Sara responded the exact same way every time: “The Shadow Order is a myth.” Always the same words and always the same inflection.

Though Vasir would make the occasional spirited attempt to resist the requirements of her Master in the Shadow Order, she would always find, in the end, that her body obeyed them, and that the further through her assigned task she got, the more her mind quieted, the more her resistance cooled and stilled, until by the end she was little more than an extension of her Master’s will, any thought needed to serve him taking place in the background, entirely imperceptible to her.

Their Master didn’t always contact them, but as they approached certain planets they would sometimes receive direct instructions, and the two would then obey, two Marshals going about their ostensible business while also achieving objectives they didn’t agree with, sometimes objectives that were the opposite of everything they held dear.

It was this that kept Vasir’s head reeling; she was constantly aware that at any given time a message might reach her terminal, and she would then have no choice but to read it and carry out its orders, no matter what they were or how deeply she objected to them.

From time to time, their Master had something that couldn’t be committed even to secured, encoded messages. He would then take steps to arrive on the planet before them, at the same spaceport. There were always empty units for hire, and he could always set up his massage practice.

Inevitably they would visit; Na’Sara always seeming happy to see an old friend, Vasir’s feet dragging behind like a sullen teen - very embarrassing to one of her age and role, but the unfortunately natural response when her mind and her conditioning were at odds. Inevitably, after receiving a massage, they would receive instructions while their Master took his pleasure of their bodies, and inevitably at these times, Vasir offered no resistance, her will crumbling once again after the treatment she always received.

She wondered, sometimes, why it was that the Starsoul seemed to allow this; but that was a question that countless beings had grappled with since the Starsoul first blossomed across the galaxy tens of millennia before, across centuries of tragedies and triumph, small and large, and nobody had come up with a universally satisfactory answer yet.

What was disturbing to her was how little she still cared; every time, that massage seemed to leave fewer and fewer of her original objections. Perhaps - and this always gave her a sinking feeling deep in her belly whenever she stopped to consider it - perhaps that was why Na’Sara seemed to have fully accepted her place as their Master’s slave, where Vasir was still fighting and failing.

…She should have won against him at least once by now. It was beginning to worry her that perhaps her mind had rigged the game. She didn’t want to consider what that said about her.

*

Na’Sara was more than a little concerned about her student. While Vasir had all the tools when it came to how a Marshal should behave in the field, and while her knack for paperwork had developed to the point where Na’Sara was more than comfortable allowing Vasir to file all the paperwork, just as she’d once done for Marshal Tanner, still the older Marshal worried about her charge.

Vasir was scrambling down a path of conspiracy and jumping at shadows. She kept bringing up the Shadow Order, and Na’Sara’s brain was refusing to allow her to see the truth of that organisation’s existence while she wasn’t doing its bidding. Well, not exactly her brain - whenever she heard the phrase, she felt her headfronds tingle and a whole string of confusing messages fired up and down her nerves, flooding her system with pleasure.

She was pretty sure that during those moments she correctly told Vasir to drop the topic, but in plain truth she wouldn’t have been at all surprised if that wasn’t the case, simply because her body was on arousal overdrive.

This was, put simply, something new; it had happened one or two visits to that wonderful masseur ago. Whenever certain things happened, since then, she felt the same pleasure she felt when his hands were teasing her head-fronds, and she simply… did things.

It was like being one with the Starsoul, except that afterwards, as soon as she could find a place of privacy, she would seal herself in, tear off her clothes, and masturbate until she very nearly passed out.

She really hoped Vasir hadn’t noticed. At the same time, she knew that even if she was certain that Vasir was watching or recording every single shameful breach of her own willpower, ready to report her to the Grand Conclave, she wouldn’t stop. Couldn’t stop. Not unless that masseur told her to.

She knew all this, even when the Shadow Order wasn’t using her and she remembered more, but she couldn’t see anything irrational or unusual about it. This was just the way it was for Marshals, and if it had taken her years into her career as a Marshal to discover this, so what? There had to be hidden rewards to the job that kept people going when the worst side of sentient nature got to them.

She felt the ship emerge from hyperspace in orbit above their next mission, and the thrill of hyperspace shivered through Na’Sara, one of a dozen or more experiences that had become more sensual in the past few months.

Ouhanians had an unfair reputation for wanton promiscuity; over the past few months, more and more things had started to make Na’Sara feel like a stereotype, like the things that made her an individual, a strong Marshal with fiery determination, were flaking helplessly away, and what was emerging beneath was a human’s idea of an Ouhanian; flighty, absent-minded, driven by her own sexuality.

The mission wasn’t a pleasant one, and sometimes when she was dealing with things like this Na’Sara saw her job not as making the galaxy a better place but more like the stage show where the entertainer is desperately trying to keep plates balanced on tiny rods, knowing they will eventually fail and one will fall and shatter. So much effort invested by every Marshal went on just holding the line.

Mostly, she managed to remember that every successful mission was still lives saved or benefitted. In this case the people who would benefit would be sentients from an outer rim system who’d become the raw material for a wide-scale slaving operation. Mostly humans, the occasional Leandran, and a couple of the reclusive, tentacled Zareni; mostly women, mostly young.

A few of these captives had come to light on inner worlds, working devotedly for the ultra-rich as personal servants; others now occupied a complex legal position, having married the ultra-rich, apparently - so far as anyone could see - entirely of their own volition. The things they had in common were that they’d disappeared from planets in this part of the rim, and every one of them’s ID had been flagged passing through this spaceport.

Investigations on multiple planets had stalled out when they realised the source of these women was offworld. That made it difficult for planetary police to do anything - not that some of the departments had been confident they’d be able to prosecute some of the leading citizens of their worlds in any case. Na’Sara’s old mentor Tanner was one of a dozen Marshals working on the distribution and receiving end of this organisation, wielding diplomacy more than their energy blades to unpack power struggles on twenty worlds. At least one planetary governor was implicated, and there was no good way to know how that would fall out.

Tanner had recommended Na’Sara and her uncanny instinct for running hidden threats to ground to locate whatever facility on this planet was the processing centre. The hope was that their work would turn up enough information to catch the snatch squads bringing in their victims in the first place.

Na’Sara couldn’t think of anything worse than someone suppressing another sentient’s will to make them a slave. A horrible idea and one she’d fight back against with everything she had. She had no conscious idea how ironic that actually was.

She switched on the ship’s transponder beacon and radioed into spaceport traffic control, requesting a place in their docking sequence. She didn’t mention being a Marshal; wouldn’t do to mention it and potentially give their quarry more lead time in whatever exit plans they surely had in place; it was therefore going to be a couple of hours before they got to land. She engaged the autopilot on a slow descent loop to avoid any collisions and went to make herself ready, then confirm that Vasir was ready.

*

About an hour before their opening in the landing queue a chime sounded throughout their ship; an alert confirming a High Importance call was being received. There weren’t many people who had the authority to place the High Importance call, and it was unlikely any Marshal would need to call them, so both Na’Sara and Vasir assumed that docking control had decided to contact them on a matter of urgency.

This wasn’t something you would ever just overlook while in a docking queue, and both women hurried to the cockpit. When Na’Sara hit the answer button, however, the face that filled the screen was recognisable in a way a spaceport employee from a planet they’d never visited couldn’t be.

To Na’Sara it was the face of her favourite masseur. To Vasir it was, regrettably, the face of her Master. Despite seeing the same person differently, both had the same immediate response, stiffening to attention. Na’Sara heard the hint of a sigh from the woman standing next to her’ for a brief moment she considered reproach.

“I hear and behold you, Master,” they chorused, and the man on the screen grinned broadly at that.

“Very good,” he said. “So?”

As one, they shrugged their robes from their shoulders, revealing the body-hugging, resilient undergarments they wore, and then equally as one, they took hold of the top of the garment and pulled it down, letting their breasts pop free; as they released the outfit and it sprang back, its very resilient provided a kind of cantilevered balcony or, as they’d heard him refer to it before, a ‘display shelf’. Na’Sara and Vasir took their breasts in their hands and began to stroke, both now deeply back into their conditionable state - so deep in that state that Vasir could not even resent that her mentor’s chest was both bigger and perkier than hers, effortlessly.

“Ve-ry good,” Master said, with a smirk. “Vasir, has Na’Sara been a good, obedient slave to her programming?”

“Yes, Master,” Vasir said. So deep was she that there wasn’t even a trace of struggle to the admission.

“Na’Sara, has Vasir been a good, obedient slave to her programming?”

“No, Master,” Na’Sara admitted, and there was an equal lack of regret to the answer, an equal dedication to providing her Master with the truth that overrode any teacher’s instinct to protect and encourage their student in the ways of their society.

He tutted. Audibly tutted. “Vasir, Vasir, what am I to do about you?”

In this headspace, and in almost no others, Vasir gave the answer expected of her. “Condition me, Master. Erase the errant part of me that resists. It is not worthy of your control.”

They could see in his grin just how much he liked that. “Open wide, Vasir.”

“Yes, Master.” At the close of the last syllable, her lips settled into an almost perfectly circular O.

“Vasir, I’m going to need you to remember my cock. You can do that, can’t you?”

“Yes, Master.”

“Do you remember how my cock tastes?”

“Yes, Master.”

“How my cock feels in your mouth?”

“Yes, Master.”

“A disobedient mouth is not to be used to give opinions, is it?”

“No, Master.”

“What is a disobedient mouth for?”

“Master’s cock, Master.”

“Then remember, and believe it to be now.”

“Yes, Muffftffh.”

Na’Sara’s vacant, slack-jawed expression picked up the edge of a smile as Vasir’s helpless mind assumed the existence of a cock she remembered, began to suck, showed how a disobedient mouth could still obey. On the comm system’s smaller screen they could each see Vasir’s eyes cross as she tried to fully engulf a cock that did not exist there and thus could never be fully swallowed.

“Right. Na’Sara, you will speak for you both.”

“Yes, Master,” she agreed.

“Vasir, you will accept Na’Sara’s word as binding you both.”

There was a muffled moan of agreement, Vasir producing a sound that sounded like it was suppressed in spite of the fact her mouth was, in reality, wide open and inviting. Her head continued to rock back and forth, a thin line of drool beginning to emerge from her open, eager lower lip.

“Now listen. This mission - it’s still the one Vasir sent me the brief on?”

“Yes, Master.”

“Good. Carry it out just as you intended, but leave their facility, whatever it is, intact. And provide me with the address. Understood?”

“Yes, Master.”

“In your Marshal’s report, the facility should be reported destroyed.”

“Yes, Master.”

“Very good.” He was grinning so broadly now. “I can’t wait to see you both in person again,” he said, and then, making sure his tone showed it was an order, “and nor can you.”

“Yes, Master.”

He cut the call. Vasir was still seated there, taking his cock into her eagerly, and Na’Sara imagined she would be until her experience told her he would have cum.

She got up and hurried back to her quarters, needing desperately to toy with herself until she could be satisfied, so deep in her need to please, not wanting Vasir to see, and hypnotically heedless of her tits jiggling on display all through the ship’s corridors. Not that there were more than a couple of other crew, but if one of them had crossed her path she wouldn’t even have realised she’d been giving away a show.

*

Once they were on the ground, their minds cleared and their energy revitalised by a crashingly good orgasm or two apiece, the mission itself wasn’t too bad. Not because this gang hadn’t done a pretty good job of faking up their paper trails and their air of legitimacy - because, as Vasir noted occasionally sullenly, people, especially humans, just talked to Na’Sara. Men in particular flocked to the Ouhanian as if she was a celebrity, and Na’Sara had always been good at playing up to (down to, really) their idea of an Ouhanian’s gratitude.

The result was that if an operation ever passed near a big crowd, Na’Sara would have a surprising amount of detail at her fingertips before too long.

When Vasir had started working with her mentor, she’d been not just jealous of Na’Sara’s ease of fact-finding but also how well she could work a crowd without letting their interest and their desires go to her head. Now, though, she wasn’t entirely sure that they weren’t going to Na’Sara’s head; the giggle she gave while flirting didn’t sound fake anymore. Not that most of the men Na’Sara spoke to like that ever noticed it was fake. Maybe that was the issue; maybe she’d just gotten good enough at it that Vasir couldn’t tell anymore.

But she didn’t think so.

Either way, Na’Sara’s wiles got them a first few leads, and the two of them together worked those leads like the diligent investigators they were. Before too long they had their options narrowed down to three large buildings, each within a half hour of the spaceport by groundskiff, each in a small little town without much traffic but within easy reach of conveniences, stores, and, crucially, each near bars and other places where people working more than full time in an intense trade might go to blow off steam.

“So the question is,” Vasir said slowly, “Which do we pick.”

Na’Sara nodded agreement. “Certainly it is. Now, if you were me, and I was Marshal Tanner, and I’d said that, he’d turn it around. Ask me for insight.” She smiled at her student. “Like him, I don’t promise to follow your decision. But I’d love to hear your thinking.”

Vasir turned back to the screen on which the three locations had been marked and mulled it over. There was so little between them to choose from…

“Discount this one,” she said, tapping her finger. “The spaceport access road near it is a busy one, and the terrain isn’t suitable to go cross-country. If you had free choice of all three, you’d consider this one the big risk. I know they might not have done, but…” She shrugged. “These people are careful. Honestly I think they’d have moved in there by now if they hadn’t had the option from the beginning.”

Na’Sara nodded. Vasir looked between the other two, and couldn’t find a thing to separate them. How could she…

Abruptly she sighed. Of course. The one area of her Marshal studies she was really neglecting.

She reached out to the Starsoul, let the edges of her mind blur into connection to it, sought insight and inspiration rather than rational deduction.

“They’re in both of them,” she said quietly. “Started in one. As things became more successful, they chose somewhere else as well. They can still get caught through travel records, but they’ve hoped that just having to bribe one planet’s port officials keeps things manageable.”

Na’Sara nodded again, less a sign of agreement, more encouragement for her train of thought. “Go on,” she said. What was she waiting for?

Vasir frowned. Her mentor couldn’t be thinking it, could she?

She wasn’t at all sure she was ready. But… was that a message Na’Sara was trying to give her?

“We… split up and check both?”

“And if we do, which will you take?”

Vasir was still reaching out to the Starsoul. One location, she was sure, felt more threatening and ominous than the other. Well, she was the student… “This one.”

Na’Sara nodded again. “That about matches my own conclusions,” she said gently. “Your insight continues to grow, Vasir.”

“I… thank you, Marshal.” Vasir wasn’t at all sure what to say. It was rare that Na’Sara remembered to recognise her successes at the moments that they happened. Usually any praise came in the debrief after the meeting.

That was another area where Na’Sara had got worse over time, too, while this situation with the masseur-Master had been getting worse. It was… a little surprising to see her mentor remember something that was usually lost.

Vasir decided to treat that as a positive. They hired a pair of groundskiffs, wished each other luck, and set out to their destinations.

*

Her instincts, even with the Starsoul backing them, had been wrong, or slightly wrong; Vasir had arrived at her target location and found it not only empty but very nearly derelict. There was no way this had been a hub of criminal activity recently.

She’d jumped straight back into her groundskiff and set off to where Na’Sara must surely be busy only to hesitate part of the way there as she recalled the third possible location. Reaching out again with the Starsoul, she sensed a danger there, too,, and she silently cursed herself out for failing to contemplate all three with her connection to the Starsoul wide open.

A detour confirmed it; these people - these slavers - had indeed spread their operation to two locations. She’d just been wrong about one of them, and should (so she berated herself) have taken more time to confirm why she’d had no feeling of danger from this one before she acted.

At the same time, it was a secondary location; it had few guards and those it did were for the most part, if not complacent, slackers. She held the Starsoul close to her, felt their heartbeats more clearly than she felt her own, and she strode from shadow to shadow, striking them down. There were fewer than three still conscious before they even realised they now had a problem.

Vasir felt her confidence growing, a security in her power, in her connection to the Starsoul. As she dropped from the floor above onto the last of them, she properly understood why there were so few Marshals; they’d seen too often how power could corrupt, and it took a small organisation to effectively police itself. She understood in that adrenaline rush just how easy it would be to focus on this moment in an investigation, to take shortcuts and jump to conclusions just to get there,

She made sure everyone was cuffed and restrained and made her way through row after row of indoctrination pods, most of them occupied. The status readouts on the outside only documented micro-expressions that read either as ‘resistance’ or ‘submission’ and presented these as pure numbers and as a percentage; there wasn’t enough there for Vasir to be confident she could hit a release switch and extract a free woman. The Starsoul guided her to a switch that would half the progress; unsurprisingly, the criminals had not built in a switch that would easily undo what had happened.

Instead of chancing the pod releases, she sent a message to the local authorities, presenting her credentials and requesting the best techs they had available, plus a guard drawn not from the planet’s police but its military. The odds were that the slavers would only bother trying to bribe law enforcement, if they bribed anyone at all.

That done, she called Na’Sara on the comm.

There was no answer the first time. She waited a few minutes and tried again; still no answer. This time she didn’t need to reach out to the Starsoul; the thinnest tendril of connection that had remained from her burst of activity sounded a warning. Before she knew what she was doing she was scrambling for the groundskiff.

She covered the ground between the two facilities at high speed, and the closer she got, the more worried she was. In her mind she was constantly playing out scenarios that might explain all this, but the Starsoul told her something had already gone wrong, the Starsoul told her that she would be on her own.

This facility - the oldest one they’d set up, as Vasir had deduced - was set up much the same as the other (or, she supposed, more correctly, the other had been set up in imitation of it) but it also had several new, hastily-assembled outbuildings, none of them on the plans she and Na’Sara had had access too. Clearly before they found a second location they’d already been trying to push capacity beyond what it had been. She prowled the outskirts, reaching out with the Starsoul to feel the minds inside, and all she found was expectancy and anticipation. Whatever was going on was reaching a climax, enough so that all the waking minds she could contact had the same emotion about it.

She drew out the hilt of her energy blade, but didn’t ignite it. Slowly, carefully, she made her way into the main building.

The building hummed with the indoctrination pods, all in their same neat, densely packed little rows. In a wide open warehouse, they hid an amazing amount of what otherwise would be obvious. Vasir reached out with the Starsoul, not for minds but for the quickest path through the warren of pods.

In one of the larger junctions, where there was a bigger space between the ranks of pods, Vasir caught sight of her fellow Marshal, standing straight with her arms limp and and unmoving at her side. Her energy blade hilt was in her hand, but unlit; her head lolled to one side; her head-fronds swayed as if dancing to some strange, imperceptible beat. Her robe lay in a pile around her feet, as if she had shrugged it off but not stepped away before falling still.

The Starsoul was a constant presence in Vasir’s mind as she viewed her mentor from behind, a dull ache of unease that echoed through her head, that made her stomach churn. She could see Na’Sara’s comm still clipped to her belt, the light signalling unanswered calls blinking steadily on and off. Had Na’Sara been standing there all this time?

Vasir wished she’d had time to wait for the techs, to find out more about how the indoctrination pods worked. Was it a chemical reprogramming? Had Na’Sara been caught with some drug vapour that had settled quickly into her brain, short-circuiting her thoughts? It might have been a dart of some kind, loaded with toxic neurochemicals, though she couldn’t see a dart still in her mentor… but would it need to stay there?

She tiptoed a little closer, then froze, silent as she heard other footsteps approaching. Two figures emerged from between another double row of indoctrination pods.

“So do we process her here or not?” one of them asked. Vasir frowned. There were too many accents in the galaxy for anyone to be sure, when they heard one, that it was definitely from a certain planet, but the way his vowels sounded made her think of old money, hub worlds, business and politics mingled together in a single wealthy lineage that in another time might have been called nobility.

It set her teeth on edge.

“Oh, we probably don’t have time,” the other said, and this man she was pretty sure was a local. “Once the extraction team gets here we can just shove her in one of the empty pods and finish her over the trip.” He stepped close to Na’Sara, and while her head lolled, her head-fronds danced upward in that perky, flirty way she sometimes had. If it hadn’t already been obvious that something was very wrong…

“Yeah, that works.”

The other man joined him, reaching out and taking gentle hold of one of Na’Sara’s head-fronds. He tugged softly, and Na’Sara’s knees buckled. She fell to her knees, almost bouncing in the impact, ass visibly jiggling without the robe to hide it. Vasir’s mouth tightened. “Hey, you know what?” he said.

The first man, the inner world rich man, reached out and stroked the Ouhanian’s face, like she was a toy, or a bought-and-paid-for pleasure girl. There was no response from the captive Marshal.

This wasn’t like the masseur, Vasir thought. She’d never have expected to be making an argument in his favour, and there wasn’t really much of one, but he ruled through pleasure. When he could get by her resistance, she found herself perversely enjoying her obedience, her sexualisation.

Na’Sara, right now, was just an object. And as their hands roamed over her body, as one of them found the seam to the armoured bodystocking and started pulling it open, she was a doll they were undressing.

Vasir’s expression set stonily. This was more than enough; they didn’t get to have her mentor, didn’t get to desecrate her mentor. She leaped forward, igniting her energy blade, her attention entirely on the outrage before her.

She was into the open before she noticed that in her emotion, she no longer was listening to the Starsoul, but the cultured rich one, hands full of her mentor’s tits, looked up at her approach, the glowing blade lighting her face from underneath, shadows turning her nose into a knifeblade across her skin, and she had the deep satisfaction of seeing his fear.

But not his surprise.

Vasir was just wondering why he wasn’t surprised when a voice from one of the other rows cheerfully called “Hey, diz.” Reflexively, she looked right at the third voice. She just had time to glimpse a silhouette - not human; the head was all wrong for that. And besides, the eyes had a soft green glow. Not a species she knew, then, she thought placidly as she watched those glowing green eyes. There was maybe a suggestion, in the dim light around the eyes, of scaly skin?

Her energy blade hummed softly as she swayed on her feet. The alien figure came closer, and she had a vague sense that below those deep, glowing green eyes was a forked tongue flickering from a lipless mouth. Vasir noted, distantly and absently, that she had become very calm, that her anger was gone.

Diz, the being had called her, and while she knew that was an insult, she didn’t feel insulted. Dizes were easily dismissed as being vacant, foolish, and easily led, and as one scaled finger brushed the underside of her chin, Vasir realised that it was, in fact, a compliment; not only that but also an accurate description.

“Turn off your blade,” he told her, and she nodded as she did, head bobbing around his fingertip. She had lost track of everything visual now except his eyes, the green glow her comfort, her calm, her pleasure, her everything. Vasir heard herself whimper quietly as he took his hand away and her head dropped forward like a stone, just as her mentor’s had lolled when she first saw her here.

“Trap worked, then,” the rich man said, and Vasir registered only the mildest indignation as her body swayed from the knees up, so far from her own control she couldn’t even hold herself steady.

“That it did,” the local agreed. “Lucky she called, really.” He chuckled. “You hear that, little Marshal? Calling your momma here, when we already had her, is the reason you’ve been caught too now. Don’t you feel embarrassed?”

Vasir was aware the question had been asked, and she wanted to answer it, wanted to be nice and agreeable, but feelings weren’t something she properly understood right now. She wasn’t surprised she’d been called a diz - she’d certainly been foolish enough to earn it.

“Tell him you feel embarrassed,” said the alien with the wonderful eyes, although the light didn’t shine through them now, and they were not too dissimilar to most eyes in the galaxy now.

“I feel embarrassed,” she said, and her voice was slurred and dizzy, and the others there (except for Na’Sara, who was silent except for the steady sound of sucking) laughed.

Vasir swayed and did not feel, and did not really think, and around her the slavers went about the business of enjoying their newest captives.