To understand the Gai Shift & to review the characters in this story, check out this useful guide: Gai-Shift Encyclopedia of Knowledge
Chapter 1: Coming of the Norsewomen
It was a London unrecognizable by our money-driven, computer-threaded, media-shouting world, a London divergent from ours by the amazing biological thunder-flash of 1922. In this London airships loiter from the Tower Bridge masts, steam omnibuses stutter about the streets and the skies clear of smog and the walls, graffiti. Its sidewalks team with women, some proudly strutting, some secured and meek (a role often changing weekly). Socially beneath them scuttle men (or mannis), belted and strapped and subservient, property of their mistresses.
Upon the crystal-clear Thames, the Royal barge churned along on a pleasure outing, its clockwork engines ticking. On its bow, Queen Lilla tipped her face back to catch the sun, her crazed scarlet tresses fanning out like a peacock's tail. “We see,” she regally intoned, “that your portrait has been well received at the National Gallery.” (see gai-shift - portrait)
Lady Petunia Goldwaith nodded, her short but shapely body filling her petticoats to good effect, her blonde ringlets flashing in the sun. “Yes, Officer Constance has the riots under control. And I must thank you for arranging the engagement. Cordefriseur captured my likeness well.”
The Queen smiled whimsically at the thought of what else the French painter had captured. The image of the sluttily-dressed Royal Scientist tied hard over a bamboo chair had been quite the eye-full.
“I trust the King is well?”
Lilla shrugged. “We do not know. We left him bound upon the bed this morning, a nice tight tie with thin cutting ropes, gagged with his own undershorts. No doubt the maids have discovered him and dragged him into some little nook for their own amusement.” The Queen turned to look over Petunia's shoulder. “We seem to have taken on a stowaway.”
From a hatch, a small wiry girl no more than nineteen clambered onto the deck, her pixie-cut hair the color of lubricating oil, golden bronze. She had an openly optimistic face, her button nose dusted with freckles and filmed with grease. With her baggy pants, work boots and smudged linen shirt, she stood quite apart from the ladies of culture around her (who, in turn, stood quite apart from her).
The imp hunched down to throw her merry voice into the dark hatchway. “Okay, try it now.”
The clockwork engine, its clattering presence beneath the notice of the lofty passengers, came online in a well-balanced whir, running smoother than it ever had.
Petunia smiled with knowing patience. “Your Majesty, may I introduce my assistant Vanessa.”
“Van,” the lithe girl corrected with a twinkle in her blueprint-blue eyes. “No need for all those girly syllables.” While she didn't bow to her Queen, she did tug her forelock.
“Your assistant?” Lilla commented with open reservation. “Wasn't that...?”
“No, she's the one who stole those woman-made wings and terrorized London as the Knightsbridge Angel.”
“But then wasn't there...?”
“No, she took over the Pit and planned to capture every women on Earth with Martian tripod machines. No, Vanes.... Van seems to have no megalomania traits so far. She introduced herself in quite a unique fashion, hacking the card deck to my Willie Hall residence. I was reclining in my bathtub, soaking in the suds, enjoying the peace when suddenly I found myself firmly gripped by gloved MI hands. A rubber ducky was pushed between my teeth and tied in place with a washcloth. Meanwhile, other hands soaked towels which were wrapped around and around my body, firmly cocooning me in their skin-tight folds. I couldn't move, could only watch as my bare feet were lifted, streaming and sud-tipped. Other hands move in, hands with toothbrushes and scrubbers. Pinioned as if I were in stocks, I could only quiver and quake in my bath as my bare feet were given the most thorough going over. The bristles whisked this way and that, through my insteps, around my heels, between my toes, a very... restorative experience. After that I was hung inverted on the laundry line, slowly draining into the grass. Van came out of the bushes then to speak earnestly of her interest in things mechanical and a desire for employment at Goldwaith Laboratories. She made two good points...”
“With clothespins,” Van smiled, blue eyes dancing like pilot-flames, the breeze ruffling her short hair.
“...and so I hired her.”
“And then she ran me through her new bath program.”
“I wanted to see how it worked.”
“For five hours?”
“You looked so cute.”
“Is there some point to this?” the Queen asked.
=< O >=
The point of this was actually three miles down the Thames in the form of a eye the hue of glacial ice peering through a periscope.
“We're abeam of the Greenwich dunking stools.”
A position was plotted.
“Coming up on the Docklands manni pens. There is a great deal of male meat behind the wire.”
“Perhaps a side-raid...?” a be-horned crewwoman breathed. Even though the vessel was not propelled by internal combustion (few things in the Gai-world were), things aboard were better when every cylinder had its own piston.
“Tower bridge is in sight,” the captain bluntly noted. “Rig for silent running.”
The XO nodded carefully lest her helmet slip off her sweaty brow, and moved off to apply firm gags to the hammock-bound off-duty crew.
=< O >=
Lady Goldwaith and her assistant left the Queen to her furious fanning and drifted to the barge's stern.
“I still think automated tickle stocks would be a good invention,” Van pouted.
“You must understand tradition. There are women who have been trained since childhood at the art of tickling. They handle all public tactualcutions in Hyde Park. If word got out you'd raised this idea to the Queen, you'll likely find yourself roped up in some dark cellar someplace, your boots stripped away, your toes tied back, in very unsympathetic company.”
“I could stand it,” the tomboy-mechanic declared.
“I seem to recall how well you stood it when I put you into my bath. When you were wrapped up in soaking towels, your feet raised up, the brushes sweeping back and forth. 'Oh no on no! Lady Petunia! Help!' ”
“I wouldn't have said that if the gag had been in.”
“Very brave of you.”
“You got to be gagged.”
“I liked to be gagged. Besides, your program didn't offer me the choice.”
Whatever erotic observations were yet to come were nullified when, with a crash, the center of the barge rose up in splintering fragmentation. There was a 'swang!' was the clockwork drive-shaft disintegrated.
“I just fixed that!” Van shrilled. A moment later the deck heaved even higher, tossing the two women into a heap of agitated and occupied petticoats, as nice a place as ever one could tumble into. Petunia groped and fondled her way to the top of the pile. What she saw filled her clever green eyes with keen wonder.
A huge iron coning tower jutted from the barge's abused midships, an upraised ram running bow to bridge, its high flank adorned by a malignant porthole. From just behind the tower a column of steam vented from a snorkel pipe. Petunia gauged the length of the strange war-vessel from its armored bow to its tuna-tail but thankfully kept it to herself lest a naval architect hold the author to any unpleasant realities.
The scientist did admit, “I like her lines. Mmmmm. Very phallic.”
At that, the hatches popped open and out spilled a wave a blonde Norsewomen, their hair like flaxen gold, their helmets horned, their eyes lustfully blue.
From atop the tower a woman majestically tall and Norse looked over the confused members of the royal party, her frame magnified by her armor, her face masked by the partial helmet with its great horns. She was like something out of a Frazetta painting, monstrous, dangerous and rather sexy. In her gauntletted hands was a copy of “Winsdale's Pictorial Guide to Linage”. Her cold helmet-shadowed eyes went from it to the quaking nobles. They locked on Lady Petunia Goldwaith.
“Her,” she commanded.
“By Odin Bound Naked In My Bed, take her,” shouted a viking. The achingly beautiful women launched themselves across the deck, scattering nobility like the fluff they were. Petunia, trapped, set herself in fighting stance, whirling nimbly about and crossing her wrists behind her with ninja-grace. After all, nothing excited her like a good kidnapping. It was always fun, especially the part where the captors showed their power through debauched liberties. Andes tribesmen, African natives, it always proved satisfying.
Before she could hope to offer a suggestion about how she might like to be tied, a thick cloth gag was wrenched between her pearl-like teeth. Surrounded, the vikings handled her rudely and tied her thoroughly, wrapping up her torso with such vigor that her breasts could only jut and her shoulders tremble. More ropes lashed up her arms, from fore to wrist, a half-dozen knots locking them up. Her petticoat was torn away, revealing shapely nyloned legs well set off by round-toed boots with exaggerated heels. Ropes took care of these succulent limbs, encircling her flesh with force enough to set it to bulging in the most enchanting manner.
Whatever resistance might have been mounted collapsed at this; women who might have waded into the fray found themselves mesmerized by the image of Petunia being trussed up in the tightest manner possible. Most of them had savored her likeness in the National Gallery; to see her live, distressed and de-skirted, roped and abased, would bring pause to the coldest of hearts. Lacking the cell-cameras of our world, the onlookers committed the image to memory as best they could. They would remember this moment often many sleepless nights to follow.
Only little Van moved against them. Petunia was her boss and mistress, the woman she was sworn to serve. Further, Van had a really neat set of punch cards she'd planned to slip into Petunia's MI bedmaker in a few days. Oh, the things she would suffer. And now it was all at risk from these operatic rejects!
“You leave Petunia alone!” she shouted as she threw herself at the shield-maidens. One of them laughed and tossed her to the deck. “Look at this. A little boy is trying to stop us. That's rich! Ho ho!”
Van's tomboy clothing and modest torso had fooled the vikings, not that it worked out to her advantage. With the submersible's captain focused on Petunia being rousted below and the other vikings keeping the Queen's beefeaters at bay, the marauders quickly threw themselves on the lithe figure, binding her up quickly into a ball and stuffing her into a sack. This little manni would make a nice below-deck snack, one that could be passed struggling and whining from hammock to hammock.
Twisting against her tight cords, Van could do nothing as her sacked form was passed from palm to sweaty palm, down through the forward hatch, into the throbbing depths of the strange craft.
“Odin Roped To A Hobby Horse, the buxom blonde is stowed, Captain!” the assault leader called out.
“Away then,” the fearsomely armored figure commanded. With a clanging of hatches, the submersible bottled up. A moment later it backed clear of the floating wreckage of the royal barge, quickly sinking beneath the river's surface.
Aboard the barge, royal sailors fell into their abandon-ship training which permitted them to speedily truss their highborn passengers into life-straightjackets and toss them clear. These castaways, slowly spinning in the currents, could only worry about salvage rights and what it might mean if someone found them looped up in canvass strapping and laying in semi-naked helplessness on pungent mudflats.
But nobody would salvage Queen Lilla. Her beefeaters clung to her trussed form as she went into the water, paddling their way slowly towards Parliament Dock. When she was pulled, dripping and trussed, from the river but before she was whisked to a warm belted body-wrap, she turned to the beefeater chief.
“Get me Sergeant Featherthrust.”
20.12.11
story continues in Gai-Shift - Thermocline Chapter 2: Weapons of Mass Depravity
o0o