Pantheon 00 - Age of Godpunk (40 page)

“I just never would have suspected you were one of them. It was a hell of a shock, I’m sure you can appreciate that. You sprang it on me out of the blue. And I... I didn’t react in a very mature fashion. It was too sudden, too big for me to make sense of. All the while, we’d been going down this path together, you and me, this sunlit road paved with gold and lined with roses, and suddenly here’s you suggesting we take a detour through the woods where it’s dark and there are thorns and nettles. I wasn’t expecting that at all. I wasn’t ready.”

She hesitated. Barnaby detected a note of trepidation in her voice, the sound of someone teetering on the verge of a momentous decision. He wanted to speak, to coax her across the threshold, but he kept silent. The wiser course was to allow her to take the final step all by herself.

He was on tenterhooks. A cherished dream was close –
this
close – to coming true.

Lydia took a deep breath, like a swimmer about to dive.

“I may be ready now.” She held his gaze, anxious but resolute. “If it’s what you’d like. If it’ll bring the two of us closer. If it’s the only way we can be together again. I’m prepared to make the sacrifice. I’m prepared to try, at least.”

Barnaby stood up, hearing his heartbeat loud in his ears, feeling the blood rushing through every vein.

“My God,” he said, hoarse. “Really? You have no idea what this means to me, Lydia. This is the best news I’ve ever had. I love you. Truly, I do.”

“And I love you too. Even after everything. I must be crazy, but yes, I still love you.”

“So when can we start?”

She shrugged gamely. “Now would seem as good a time as any.”

SAFEWORD

H
E LAID OUT
the basics, the rules. Informed consent had to be established beforehand. That was the grounding for any kind of sexual power exchange. They must be clear which of them was going to be the Top and which the Bottom, who was going to dominate and who was going to be dominated, although that should already be quite evident. He wouldn’t take her any further than she wanted to go, especially as it was their first session, and above all else they must agree on a safeword. It couldn’t simply be “no” or “don’t,” since sometimes in a bondage context those meant nothing. The safeword needed to be incongruous and easily remembered and recognised.

“How about ‘Gaia’?” Lydia said. “That’s been on my mind a lot today.”

“Mine as well. Gaia it is.” He couldn’t see a reason why not.

“And the moment I say it, you stop whatever you’re doing?”

“That’s the general idea.”

“What if you don’t? What if you just carry on? What do I do then?”

“You have to trust me. That’s the whole point. If you can’t trust me when you submit to me, then we have no business doing any of this stuff.”

“I see. So I’m placing myself entirely in your hands. I’m at your mercy.”

“You are,” Barnaby said. “But I’m no ogre, and I promise you I’ve never once lost control or gone too far. You’ve nothing to fear.”

“I must be mad. I can’t believe I’m even considering going through with this.” Lydia nodded to the sideboard, where cut-crystal decanters sat on a salver. “Any of those whisky, by any chance?”

“Will Laphroaig thirty-year-old single malt do?”

“Don’t care how fancy it is. Just pour me a snifter. A large one.”

She took the tumbler and drained the scotch at a gulp.

“Right,” she said, exhaling hard. “Shall we?”

KEEPER

D
OWN IN THE
basement he made her strip off all her clothes. He himself undressed to his underpants.

“Don’t you get to be naked too?” she asked.

“I’m in charge. I choose. I want you without a stitch on, so that’s how it has to be. And if I want to keep something on, I will.”

“Ooh, masterful.”

“Now be quiet.” Barnaby surveyed the various pieces of apparatus. “Where should we begin? The Berkley Horse, I think.”

He led her to the A-frame device. Her feet went into slots in the bottom. He lowered her forward on the angled, padded board, fitting her face into an oval hole. He buckled canvas straps across her legs, waist and arms, fastening her flat. She was immobilised, helpless.

He deliberated over what to beat her with. In the end he settled on a fibreglass riding crop. The thin leather tongue at the tip, known as the ‘keeper,’ was designed to lessen the force of the blow and not leave a mark. It was a good selection for a novice.

He positioned himself beside her, his target the enticing plump mounds of her buttocks.

He extended his arm, crop raised.

“Don’t tense up,” he told her. “Relax. You know you want this.”

He flicked the crop.

Keeper met skin with a glorious sharp
snap
.

Lydia shook from head to toe. A small gasp escaped her.

Barnaby drew the crop back and flicked it again, a fraction harder this time.

The keeper struck smartly. Lydia flinched and shuddered.

Barnaby looked down to see the front of his underpants tented outwards. The pressure of restriction down there was painful, terrible – wonderful.

He started to beat her with a regular, consistent rhythm, revelling in the impacts and the intervals between.

He kept expecting the safeword to come, but it didn’t.

Lydia took her punishment stoically. Now and then she let out a hiss or a little cry. But whenever he checked her face, Barnaby was pleased to see that she was smiling.

FIVE ON THE MERCALLI

INTENSITY SCALE

B
ARNABY ARRIVED AT
the GloCo Tower the next morning in a spry, sprightly mood. His PA, Veronica, couldn’t remember when she had seen him cheerier. He positively breezed through the antechamber, past her desk and into his office, like a man who hadn’t a care in the world, and she hesitated before going in after him. But she had to. She had bad tidings to deliver.

“Mr Pollard, I’m sorry, but we’ve just received a flurry of emails from Japan. There’s, er, there’s been an earthquake. Nothing devastating,” she hastened to add. “A minor tremor, that’s all. Only, it was on the south coast and the epicentre was on the Atsumi Peninsula, not far from Ise Bay...”

He filled in the rest. “Which is not far from Cape Irago, which is where a GloCo nuclear power plant sits. Shit. How severe’s the damage?”

“Unclear. The site manager’s running an inspection right now. He seems to think it’s just superficial, a few cracked walls here and there. But of course he’s shut the reactor down and evacuated all non-essential personnel, as a precautionary measure.”

“No radiation leaks?”

“None detected so far.”

“Thank fuck for that.” Barnaby paused to give himself time to think. “Okay, Veronica, contact Hayashi at GloCo Japan and tell him to get his arse out of Tokyo pronto and head down to Atsumi.”

“I believe he’s already on his way, sir.”

“Good. Then put me through to his mobile, so that I can tell him I want him smiling and shaking hands with every technician at the plant, and I want photographers taking pictures of him doing it, and I want that reactor back online by close of business here in the UK.”

“Right away, sir.”

Barnaby spent much of the rest of the day on the phone, marshalling resources halfway across the world. It was evening in Japan, but GloCo employees there responded admirably, working into the small hours to establish the plant’s integrity and make sure full safety protocols had been adhered to. The plant operated a third-generation advanced pressurised water reactor, generally held to be the most efficient and securest of its kind, equipped with countless passive safety features and a plethora of active failsafe measures to contain meltdown. According to the seismology department at the nearby Aichi Prefectural University, the quake had been low on the Mercalli intensity scale, registering as a ‘Five – Rather Strong,’ a category in which the worst that could happen was slight damage to buildings. All that the Cape Irago plant suffered was the odd bit of broken plasterwork and the collapse of the Styrofoam-tile false ceiling in the staff canteen. By mid-afternoon GMT, past midnight Japan Standard Time, the reactor was up and running again, churning out its customary two thousand megawatts of power.

In the wake of the Fukushima disaster, the Japanese were understandably paranoid about a repeat incident, but Hayashi, as GloCo’s national head of operations, did a bang-up job reassuring the media that there was nothing to worry about and never had been. Barnaby himself conducted a couple of Skype interviews with BBC World and NHK’s
News Watch 9
, calmly allaying any lingering fears.

All in all, a good day’s work and a well-executed exercise in crisis management and brow soothing. Barnaby went home pleased, and that night manacled Lydia to the bondage table in a prostrate position, face down, backside aloft, and whacked her with a wooden spanking paddle until her buttocks glowed red.

THE
GLOCO BYZANTIUM

T
WO DAYS LATER,
a GloCo TI class supertanker foundered on shoals one hundred miles off the coast of California.

The
GloCo Byzantium
was transporting its cargo of light crude from the La Plata terminal in Argentina up to the Port of San Francisco when extreme weather, coupled with some calamitous navigational decision-making and a glitch in the automated course correction software, saw it deviate out of the shipping lanes and stray onto the Cortes Bank. It struck the Bishop Rock, the highest peak of the undersea basalt ridge, which at low tide lay only a few metres below the surface. The
Byzantium
’s double hull was torn open like tinfoil, and oil began gushing out. Within moments the supertanker was listing horribly and the captain had no alternative but to give the order to abandon ship. The twenty-man crew all made it safely into the life rafts, but had to endure several hours of being tossed about on heavy seas before a coastguard helicopter located them and a US Navy frigate arrived on the scene to rescue them.