A Number of Wrong Turns

Chapter 4

The ranch, it turned out, had a dungeon.

An actual dungeon.

Admittedly, the rough stone bricks were made from papier-mâché, and the chains looked like they'd been bought from a garden centre and painted black, but it was a dungeon.

It'd just never been intended to hold a person before... at least, judging from implements of sensual fetishism on the walls, not for more than an hour. But as one of my escorts pointed out, when I voiced my incredulity, it had locks, and the only way out of the dungeon was back up the flight of stairs.

Deciding not to mention the obvious fire hazard in having a single exit, I focussed on the dungeon itself; it'd been converted from a cellar into a short underground corridor which branched off into multiple cells. Presumably this was intended so it could 'service' multiple clients, but I had the impression that this place didn't see a lot of activity. BDSM wasn't one of my kinks, so I had only what I'd read to go on, but I was fairly sure that if someone had gone to the trouble of buying a display rack, then whips and crops shouldn't be tossed haphazardly into a crate.

I filed the neglect as another oddity. As mentioned, I don't have a lot of experiences with brothels, but this place was downright strange; it was supposed to be where Andskoti rewarded loyal humans. Bondage wasn't as big a kink as Hollywood tried to suggest, but it was one of the more popular ones and unless they had another sex dungeon, this one's disuse didn't make much sense.

...Unless I factored in the women's misandry and lack of discipline.

"You're civilians!" I stated, drawn up short by the revelation.

"We're contractors." Claire growled, in a way that suggested she found the distinction both important... and depressing.

"Of course," As her friend prodded me back into walking, I apologised lest they amuse themselves by bludgeoning my head against a wall. "I didn't know there were any... 'contractors' on Earth." I was trying to remain polite

The one who wasn't Claire snorted. "Like an officer is going to work in a whorehouse?"

I had to grant her that; we'd pondered the paradox ourselves. But that did explain why we hadn't been able to find which personnel had been assigned to the ranch in the records we'd stolen. However, the revelation merely underscored the direness of my situation; the Andskoti military was an honourable and well paid profession, one that, thanks to ample labour from conquered worlds and mandatory National Service, employed a majority of their species.

If the military didn't want them, then they'd either failed to handle the discipline... or they'd been kicked out. Neither possibility boded well for me.

I grunted as a hard hand slapped between my shoulder blades, shoving me into the rightmost cell. The dust was thicker here, stirred up by the doors opening and I coughed twice as my eyes adapted to the low light.

Something was before me; it was narrow, made of rusty iron, hanging about two feet off the floor...

"You're kidding me." I straightened with a jolt, finally recognising the cylindrical cage. It was about five feet tall, looked like a gibbet and hung from a single chain. As I was staring at the disturbingly solid looking metal bands, I heard the scrape of metal on metal and turned to see Claire withdrawing a key from a low set of steel drawers.

"Get in." She ordered with a merciless smile.

I won't describe all of what happened next; it could have been described as amusing, given the cage had no anchorage. The women certainly laughed a lot, at least until, on one particularly haphazard backswing I was able to crack Claire across the side of the head. Sadly the rusty metal didn't so much as graze her and earned me a sharp punch to the gut.