To Sofia Aguilar, guilt was a luxury, and one she couldn’t afford. She had fallen, by virtue of where her natural talents seemed to lie and by the happenstance of an uncle who became close friends and golf buddies with an HR director over the course of her college years, into the cut-throat world of big business, where the skills you developed had little to do with anything except making a large business run.

As a teenager in an affluent suburb she’d been aware that her friends’ parents would sometimes move from (for example) a paper company to a video game studio, and she’d always wondered how that could be as the businesses were so different. She hadn’t expected to learn in her own life, and she hadn’t expected the answer to be so dull.

Still, even under its current state of suspicion, Hypercorp was one of the best jobs in town, so long as you were in the corporate division and, of course, Sofia was. She was keen to keep her job, there being few opportunities for a personal assistant if the rumour mill had gone around to inform potential employers that she couldn’t read between the lines when given direction by the Board.

And while this did weigh somewhat on her conscience, Sofia didn’t believe she could afford to listen to the guilt.

Someone had decided that Tracy Hathor was the sacrifice, the place where the blame would rest for a period where the company couldn’t possibly perform as shareholders required, and Sofia Aguilar was determined not to go down with her.

At the same time, she couldn’t afford for Tracy to fire her. It was a tricky tightrope to walk, and she needed her concentration to walk it.

As she returned to the penthouse office, she took the time in the stairwell to compose herself and settle her expression into a polite diffident look she’d worked on for months in the mirror, and thought again about the point a few years hence when she’d be able to make the jump from a PA to something that paid a little better. She found herself revisiting that thought several times a week, usually when she’d been talking to the Board - well, to ‘her contact’ on the Board.

By the time she opened the door and stepped inside, she looked every inch a diligent, hard-working assistant prepared to put in hours as long as those of the person they worked with.

“Sorry that took so long, ma’am,” she began. “I was waylaid by some managers wanting to get messages to you, and-“

She found herself seized from behind, arms wrapping around her just above the elbow. Unprepared for this, her mask dropped and she let out a shriek of shock; all the same, Sofia had three older brothers and a father who believed in encouraging machismo, and so certain reflects had developed throughout her childhood and teen years.

She wrenched forward with her left shoulder while kicking backward with her right foot. Against her brothers, the combination had never failed.

Results this time were very different; the arms binding her didn’t budge at all, even with her weight thrown behind it, and whatever she kicked, she’d have had more success if she’d aimed her foot at a rock instead.

“Welcome back.” Ms Hathor stepped out of a doorway up ahead. “Good work, Hornet.”

“Thank you, Mistress.” The answering voice - coming from just over Sofia’s shoulder - was beautiful; melodious, light, but somehow projecting. If she wasn’t feeling overwhelmed by panic, Sofia would have had room in her heart for a sudden jealousy.

“Into the lab,” Ms Hathor continued.

“Yes, Mistress.” The grip around her arms changed very fractionally, just an adjustment of angle, and now Sofia’s toes couldn’t touch the floor. She was being carried effortlessly forward, was in every way that mattered helpless.

She tried a scream, but she knew in her heart it wouldn’t be answered. People had remarked, even before Castor’s secret was revealed, on how the penthouse had different acoustics to the rest of the building, like it had been built to different standards.

“Less of that,” Ms Hathor said sharply. Sofia was headed toward a… well, to a room within the room, down some stairs, and one she’d not seen before. It was brightly lit inside, but with red lights; the shadows and the tone hid so much of what was ahead even with bright lights.

“Ma’am,” she tried. “What’s happening? Who’s your, uh…” Friend was the word that probably belonged in the sentence but saying that about a woman who was calling her boss Mistress was somehow embarrassing, and the result was that her comment died in her throat.

“You’re going to be telling me what’s been happening, Sofia,” Ms Hathor told her, and her voice was a reprimand. They were in this sunken room now - the lab, Ms Hathor had called it - and it was even creepier than when she’d first seen it.

Sofia had been absolutely certain that she’d always be on the side of her Board contact, knowing they’d be around long after Ms Hathor was paid off and looking for a startup willing to accept someone who’d taken a swing at an impossible situation and bombed. In San Francisco, that might be rare; most startups were in impossible situations and knew it, and their hope was that this could be changed with the right support.

Now, though, it was clear she’d misjudged the situation entirely. So she said “Sure. Where would you like me to start?”

Ms Hathor clucked her tongue. “Oh, Sofia, Sofia, Sofia…” She was clearly enjoying this. As cold as her tone had been before, there was a swagger to her now. “I’ve no reason to believe you right now, have I?”

“I, uh… I guess not, ma’am.” She swallowed. “Would it help if I called you Mistress?”

That provoked a laugh, and Sofia felt instantly a little less worried - if you could make someone laugh, you could reliably get them to negotiate, and if she could do that she could get out of this eventually - but only a little. She had no idea who this Hornet was, but the woman was unstoppable somehow.

This was… oh, shit.

“This is Vulcan’s stuff,” she whispered, horrified. Ms Hathor had moved deeper into the lab than the woman carrying Sofia, so Sofia got to see as she turned, holding some sort of slim remote control, and smirked.

“It was,” she said. “But it’s been made clear to me today that if I want to make it out of here and still have a career, I’m going to need to use everything at my disposal. And that means this stuff? Is mine.” She pointed her remote over her shoulder and thumbed a button, and something slid down in the background. “Load her up, Hornet,” she instructed, turning away from Sofia and consulting one of the consoles.

“Of course, Mistress,” Hornet said. Sofia tried to break loose again, the panic mounting, but it was as ineffective as she’d expected.

She was lifted and placed firmly down into a large tube, maybe three feet in diameter, that went into the floor and was currently up to just over her waist, where Hornet held her in place.

“Give me a minute,” Ms Hathor called. “I’m still learning some of these controls.” Then there was a k-thunk from just above her and some sort of gel started pouring down into the tube she was in, a thick stream that filled the tube surprisingly quickly, transparent but glowing slightly in the red light like it was somehow reactive.

The gel, whatever it was, rose up past the patent leather of her shoes and brushed against the tights covering her legs, and immediately her skin began to tingle where it touched. “What is this?” Sofia asked, fighting to keep her voice level.

“I don’t know for sure,” Ms Hathor said. “How much do you know about our old CEO?”

“Uh - what?”

“So I only discovered this place a couple of days ago,” Ms Hathor began. “And it’s very possible I’ve just not seen the thing that would explain all of this perfectly yet.”

Sofia’s ankles weren’t tingling any longer as the gel rose up around them. She flexed them experimentally, which was how she discovered she couldn’t flex them. Whatever this stuff was, it seemed it was paralytic.

“All the same,” Ms Hathor continued, “the thing you have to understand is that Castor didn’t intend for anyone else to use this stuff.” She paused. “Well, anyway, not for just anyone else. I wouldn’t bet against him thinking he’d hand it down to his daughter when she was old enough. But what I’m getting at is, he doesn’t exactly have a clear manual for this stuff.”

The gel was up around her knees now, rendering Sofia’s legs effectively frozen entirely. “Every so often he’s written stuff down, kind of in bursts. I’m thinking he might have had manic episodes?” She walked across. “You can let go of her now, Hornet,” she said.

“Yes, Mistress.”

Sofia gripped the top edge of the cylinder and wriggled herself around to face them. With more and more of her legs numb and paralysed with every passing second, it was a struggle to do, her legs a dead weight, and the gel itself hard to move through. Some had splattered on the back of one hand, too, and it was already tingling.

She didn’t want to admit it to herself but there was no way she was climbing out of that tube.

“So here’s what I know,” Ms Hathor said. “It’s breathable. It seems to be full of nutrients. You don’t age in it.” She smiled thinly. “And it will hold you in place while I work on the next part of all this.” She clicked the remote in her hand again, and the cylinder started to rise up around Sofia. She clung onto it for as long as she could, but as more and more of her was paralysed, the weight of her own body seemed heavier and she slipped down into the gel.

As the crown of her head slipped under the surface level, she found herself entirely motionless, not even her eyes able to glance from side to side, but her mind was entirely present. Sound was present but distorted by the medium she was - yes - starting to float in, a gel just sufficiently thick to buoy her up off her feet.

She could hear metal rasp on metal above her, but couldn’t turn her head to look. Ms Hathor was pointing the remote above her head and hit a button.

There was a sudden movement in the gel, like a current, up near her head, and then there was a sharp shock to her spine.

*

Sofia’s vision swam, seeming to blur for a second. The edges of everything in the red-lit room outside the cylinder became sharper, brighter, almost pixellated, the red distorting at its edges into blues and screens.

For a moment something seemed to flash on and off in the lower left hand corner of her vision. She couldn’t shake her head, nor close her eyes, nor even simply try and blink it away, but it settled and was gone in time anyway.

Sofia wondered what was happening. How that sting related to this strangeness of vision. What it was that Ms Hathor expected.

Not that she could ask.

There was… a discontinuity. A gap. Ms Hathor was suddenly three or four paces further away, the figure of Hornet - my God, what a figure - following her. Sofia’s eyes had been open the whole time, and she could not turn away, but all the same, things had changed and Sofia hadn’t seen it happen, had just seen the results.

Her vision’s edges sharpened again, and when that passed Ms Hathor was clearer and more visible than everything else in the oddly lit room. Her presence dominated the room. She seemed larger, somehow. More important.

Sofia wondered what was happening. How that sting was related to the odd feeling. What it was she should do for Ms Hathor.

…wait…

Something about that felt wrong. Her brow would have furrowed if it could, but either way she tried to sift through the stray thoughts confusing her.

Hadn’t she already thought this?

The phrase ‘deja vu’ actually swam into visibility for a moment in a smooth sans-serif font, then was gone. Moments later, it was replaced with block capitals:

ACCESSING

What was accessing what?

And then her head was too busy to think. Sofia found herself reliving fragments of her life, glimpses of moments; family connections as a child, early romances, school rivalries, sporting triumphs, and the many moments of her working life that had stuck in her head. It was every moment she’d often found herself reliving, either wistfully wishing it could have gone another way, angrily revising it to make herself look better or, rarely, confirming that she’d done the right thing and glorying in the way it had felt.

Sofia wondered what to do. How long it would take to install. What it was she should do to serve Ms Hathor.

*

“Did Vulcan ever have Alpha do anything that wasn’t criminal or sexual?” Tracy asked as the two exited the lair, sealing it behind them. She wasn’t sure how long it would take for Sofia to be fully indoctrinated, and didn’t particularly want to sit around watching.

Hornet was silent for a brief moment. “Sexuality is… broad, Mistress,” she said at last, which seemed to Tracy like quite a deep thought for somebody she had to keep reminding herself was a person of her own.

“What do you mean?”

“Vulcan took a lot of things sexually,” she said, “as long as they involved power.”

Now it was Tracy’s turn to be quiet. She was remembering the way she’d reacted as the controlled heroine licked her shoes clean. That memory, along with Hornet’s comment, had her wondering things about herself that she’d never speculated on before.

She shook her head, discarding those thoughts for the time being. This wasn’t the time to make things even more complicated. It was…

Well, she was nervous. Vulcan had taken his name from a god, and he’d always acted as if he was one. She wouldn’t have thought so, but now she was actually putting his equipment to use, she felt like she was perhaps reaching beyond where she should; well beyond her comfort zone.

There had to be a way to make this work, she told herself. And she’d have a lot more information soon, when Sofia was ready to tell her everything.

She looked at Hornet for a long moment, silent, taking in the superhuman’s effortless beauty, her ridiculously attractive form. It would be so easy to be jealous. And yet Tracy wasn’t sure she wanted that body for herself; the remote she held was all the proof she needed that physical power alone wasn’t enough. It could be overwhelmed, outthought, outplayed, tricked.

“Give me… a shoulder massage,” she said abruptly, into the silence, surprising herself with her own words.

“Yes, Mistress.” Hornet began moving toward her, circling the desk to stand behind her tall swivel chair. She had to reach around it slightly for her hands to find purchase on Tracy’s shoulders.

Holy shit, her hands were skilled. There was enough power behind her thumbs that the tension in Tracy’s shoulders melted away at little more than a touch, but her body was still soft; it didn’t seem possible that flesh so soft and yielding could shrug off bullets, come through explosions unharmed, but nothing about superhumanity really made sense.

Tracy melted into the superwoman’s grip, eyes closed, and felt the tension and the worry and the terror of the last few days melt away. A sound came out of her and she wasn’t sure what it was, would have been worried or even embarrassed by it but for the fact she really wasn’t viewing Hornet as a person, except when she actually talked to her. If she’d bought a massage chair and started to enjoy that audibly, she wouldn’t have been embarrassed.

“God,” she said after a while. “You’re good.”

“Thank you, Mistress. Do I please you, Mistress?”

There it was again, that thrill with a frisson of something more. Tracy bit her lip. Was this…

God, it would be so frustrating if it turned out all this time she’d been ignoring sex, adding a power dynamic to it would have made it something she wanted.

Her own question needed answering; Hornet’s did not. She rested her head back against the top of the chair and said “Kiss me.”

“Yes, Mistress.”

She didn’t release Tracy’s shoulders to reposition. As her head lowered in over Tracy’s shoulder, almost upside down by the time their lips met, Tracy realised the other woman must have begun to fly, lifting herself into the air so her waist could be at the right angle to obey both commands at once. The kiss was gentle, her lips so soft that Tracy’s own seemed to tingle for a moment after contact; the kiss had lasted only a moment.

Tracy felt like she could feel her heart beating - no; her heart was pounding, a level of excitement and eroticism she’d never experienced before. The irrelevance of sexuality turned out not to be so total, for her. Not when it was really about power.

She reached up impulsively, taking a handful of the other woman’s hair to steer her, and pullet Hornet’s face down for another kiss. The heroine could easily have stopped her had she exerted her strength, exerted her will; but either she couldn’t exert her will, or she wanted this.

Right at that moment, Tracy wasn’t interested in the distinction. Hornet’s mouth opened to hers and they kissed, properly and passionately, and Tracy didn’t care if the passion came from Hornet or from the device embedded in her; it was there either way, and it made all the difference to her. This was what she’d been missing. This was what she wanted.

Sexuality was secondary. Foremost was her control. Her power. She broke the kiss by lifting the handful of hair, and the superhuman moved with it easily, beautiful eyes opening to regard her. Tracy grinned and blushed, though she didn’t really know why.

She expected the other woman to say something, even though Hornet would only speak when spoken to. Silence reigned for almost a minute before she broke it. “Take off your clothes,” she said.

“Yes, Mistress.” Hornet released her shoulders and drifted forward, floating over the big, heavy desk Castor had installed, then adjusted until she was standing in the air above it.

The swimsuit came off first, Hornet peeling it off from the shoulders while rotating in mid-air, her impossibly perfect chest still sitting proud even without its support - but the slow turn meant that Tracy saw something she otherwise might not have; a tattoo-like marking just above the hip, covered by the swimsuit until just that moment.

“Hold it,” she said, and leaned forward; Hornet had frozen herself in place, pronouncing her agreement, and so she hung in space, her hip perfectly positioned for Tracy to examine the marking.

She hadn’t had any expectations of what she’d see, but if she had done, it would not have been Castor’s signature; all the same, he’d done just that, putting his mark on the woman indelibly. Tracy shivered.

On impulse she reached out, cupping Hornet’s crotch which was not yet quite free of the swimsuit her immobile hands still gripped. The thighs were, again, soft and yielding around her fingers, a temptation just through existing, but what Tracy had been looking for she found; the fabric was wet.

Taking her hand back, she sniffed her fingers and enjoyed the musk that filled her nostrils. Hornet was enjoying this. Artificially or of her own accord was irrelevant.

“Continue,” she said, wondering if there was any way to replace that signature with her own.

“Yes, Mistress.”

Hornet completed her revolution to face Tracy directly and worked the swimsuit over her wide hips and down past thighs thick enough to post an obstacle deftly, shimmying her hips.

She’d almost certainly been given instruction on how to do this; Tracy made a mental note to have her young PA strip, too, so she could see if that instruction had been given directly or programmed into the control device.

The boots followed, with Hornet shifting into a seated position in midair, extending first one booted foot and then the other, her hands running down her bare legs, collecting the zipper on the way, and smoothly peeling them off. They soon sat side by side on the desk.

She was still wearing the metal wristbands, but she’d come to a halt. Tracy wondered if she was even aware of the bands, if they didn’t count as ‘clothes’ in her washed brain, but didn’t ask; in the end, it didn’t really matter.

She stood, fumbling with her belt, and stripped below the waist. Then she sat back down. “You know what I want you to do?”

“Yes, Mistress. To please you, Mistress.”

Tracy smiled and nodded, and the heroine floated forward, sinking to her knees before the chair. Placing her hands gently on Tracy’s bare inner thighs, stroking slowly, she leaned forward and began gently kissing her way up those same thighs, making Tracy wonder where exactly she’d learned this.

But then her lips were against Tracy’s wet, waiting pussy, and her tongue danced out, eager to please and skilful, and Tracy did not cost herself pleasure by spending time distracted from her heroine’s attentions…