I glanced at my watch and decided that it was time to go to work. After finishing my coffee, I left my house and strolled unhurriedly down the drive. At the kerbside, the pony and cart was waiting as it did every morning to ferry me to the office of the Xanxta Chronicle, or Slaveland News as it is nicknamed.

The cute young brunette, name of Katie, harnessed naked to the cart was the same one I booked every day - a preference of mine. I settled into the comfortable buggy, picked up the reins from where the last passenger had thoughtfully wrapped them around the armrest, and flicked them sharply across the girl's naked back. "Hyyahhh!" I called, reliving a childhood fantasy of being a cowboy wagon-driver.

I watched the girl's superbly toned muscles flex as her thighs began to work. The cart moved off smoothly, for she was well trained and very experienced. I have been following this beautiful creature's development. When she was first enslaved at the tender age of seventeen and put between the shafts, she was thin and reedy and barely able to pull the cart. Now, eighteen months later and just turned nineteen, she had a superb athletic body and could pull both cart and customers all day, five days a week, without collapsing. That was not to say she wasn't exhausted every night, but she could do it. Some girls reach a point where they can physically do no more, no matter how much you whip them.

I idly studied Katie's beautiful bottom as the girl pulled the cart along. The skin was as lovely as ever with the smooth firmness that only a teenager has, but I noted a couple of fresh red whip marks on it, undoubtedly ones she had received this morning. Well, it was now around half past eight and she would have been on duty since seven, so she would already have had a few customers. I've visited Katie a few times in the stables to take advantage of her nubile young body and she told me that the first couple of hours in the morning were the least worst as a pony, when it was still relatively cool and she was fresh from a night's rest and also customers were few and far between. Later in the day, with the powerful sun beating down and loads of people about, she would have journey after journey to make with hardly any rest in between. At such times, the whip would be used quite frequently to keep her going and only that, plus her strong stamina and considerable willpower, kept her from collapse. But already today I could see a considerable gleam of sweat on her back. I surmised that somebody had wanted a long and possibly rapid journey this morning, and Katie had been the unfortunate pony that had to deliver. Well, that was her hard luck; it didn't mean she could dawdle on my journey and she was moving a bit more sluggishly than usual. I picked up the whip and ran it through my fingers, feeling the cool leather, then cracked it expertly (if I do say so myself) so that the tip stung Katie's upthrust ass.

"Mmggfff!"

There was an anguished gasp from behind the bit in her mouth and then a perceptible increase in her efforts. I felt the cart pick up speed and I relaxed, contemplating the beautiful, labouring female in front of me. When Katie had first been brought - completely against her will, of course - to Xanxta, she had been shy and timid, naturally outraged at what was being done to her and horribly (for her, entertainingly for the rest of us) embarrassed at being stripped naked and harnessed like an animal. Now it was second nature to her. She had not been allowed a stitch of clothing for eighteen months and so nudity was natural to her. So was rough treatment: she accepted, from long hard experience, my total right to put that whip across her bottom. Protest was not an option for her: all she could do was work harder, push her already tired muscles further to avoid more stinging leather on her unprotected rump. Her shiny brunette hair, done up neatly into a ponytail, bounced around her bare back as she laboured.

The newspaper offices came in sight; a very welcome sight, no doubt, for Katie. I pulled on the reins and she obediently slowed and then stopped at the kerbside in front of the building. I climbed out of the cart and regarded her. You could see the sweat running down her body, oozing out of every pore and you could hear her heavy breathing, the air whistling past the bit as she took great lungfuls in, breasts rising and falling as she did so. I reached out a hand and felt her left boob. She didn't pull away or even flinch: she was totally enslaved nowadays, fully compliant, no resistance to her fate left in her, although she retained plenty of spirit. That is the great skill of training a slave, to make them submit without crushing the innate spirit. Katie certainly had plenty of spunk. Unusually for a pony girl, her breasts were completely unfettered. All pony girls are extremely fit and athletic and consequently pretty firm-breasted, but even so most needed some degree of support for their mammaries, usually in the form of harness straps just above and below the boobs, helping to stop them bouncing. Of course, they were also well trained in running with a smooth gait to give the passenger a less bumpy ride and also reduce breast bounce, but even so the stable overseers usually found it necessary to add some support straps. Not so Katie, whose firm chest barely seemed to move at all even though she was reasonably well endowed, though her tits were more the 'bud' type than the 'melon' sort.

I fished in my pocket for the sugar lump I put there each morning and pushed it into her mouth, past her red lips and the bit. Her lovely sea-green eyes glanced at me with gratitude for a moment; it was a bit of a daily ritual for me, but for her it was a source of a little more energy, and she would need every erg before the day was done. Besides, it was a small act of kindness and she didn't get many of those.

I reached down to the crotch strap that ran from her waistband between her legs and back up the other side. Her puffy sex lips, covered by brown curls of pubic hair totally on display, had already, because of her exertions, to some extent wrapped themselves around the thin strap. I took the top of the strap by her waistband and pulled it, making the crotch section push in deeper. There was a slight clatter of her steel-lined boots as Katie fought to stand still against the push of the strap and the cart moved back a few inches before she managed to regain her equilibrium. I pulled harder and the crotch strap went deeper. Katie stared ahead, still sweating profusely and closed those sea-green eyes. I knew that she was close to orgasm. She was always close to orgasm. Teenage girls are always full of raging hormones especially very fit ones. After eighteen months as a pony girl Katie was extremely fit indeed and the tension caused by her helplessness, her bondage and her nudity all contributed. In her early days as a pony slave (she was less fit then, of course, but very afraid, which compensated) Katie was very embarrassed by this, particularly with her hard nipples and wet pussy so visible, but now it no longer bothered her. In fact, like many ponies, Katie enjoyed sex most of the time. Shorn of the restrictions, the inhibitions and the codes of conduct that prudish, puritanical western society impose and also stripped of the pride of normal teenage girls that prevent them doing many things that they might actually like to, Katie was almost permanently on a hair-trigger to orgasm. It didn't make up for the indignities, pain and exhaustion she had to suffer every day, but it made them a little more bearable.

I played with Katie's crotch strap for a few more moments then gave her a slap on her bare rump to send her on her way. The sweating girl began to walk and the cart behind her was pulled away. The crotch rope, which bore a little of the weight of the cart, would keep on digging into her. She would orgasm before much longer, I suspected. If she were lucky, it would be when she was not pulling a passenger, when any slowing of her gait might lead to another taste of the whip.

Forgetting Katie, I stepped into the air-conditioned foyer of the offices. Emma, who manned the reception desk, looked up and smiled. "Good morning, Mr. Williams," she said sweetly.

"Morning, Emma," I replied and reached out to squeeze her boob too; another daily ritual. Emma, who was eighteen and a sultry brunette, was wearing only a pair of frilly knickers and high heels. It was not by her choice. Well, it was, but she was only allowed to choose her daily working outfit from a limited set of choices: a variety of knickers, panties and thongs, or a couple of tiny micro-skirts with which she was not allowed panties, or other similar options.

"You've got just a couple of letters," she said, ignoring the hand on her mammary as much as she could, although her face was always a little redder at such times.

I let go of her tit and took the proffered letters. "I'll be in my office," I said. It was time to start earning my pay as one of the paper's small band of reporters and column writers.

 

Emma is not a slave she is an employee, though in some ways her situation was worse than that of a slave. She is what we call an "indentured worker". Mostly, including in Emma's case, that means an outsider who has accepted a job in Xanxta and on arrival found the conditions of employment to be rather different to those that she expected. However, the contract of employment is for a fixed term and she cannot leave the town before that period is up. She can, however, be dismissed from her post and unfair dismissal is not a concept which the courts here have much time for. Since her accommodation is provided as part of the job, she could end up on the streets. Vagrancy in Xanxta is an offence punishable by a term of slavery.

Alternatively, it is very easy for a citizen of Xanxta to bring a complaint against an indentured girl before the court and the court, in theory, treats all persons as equals but in practice will not take the word of a newcomer against that of an established citizen. Again, the likely upshot was a conviction and the sentence of a term of slavery. So, Emma and others like her find on arrival that they have a choice: accept outrageous working conditions for the term of their contract (usually, including in her case, a year), grit her teeth and endure it, bend over backwards to keep on the right side of everybody for fear of a complaint, or run the risk of a three to five year sentence of slavery. It meant a level of compliance that was only on the surface different to slavery. If a man asked Emma for a date, she would be very foolish to decline. If he wanted sex, she would be well advised to agree; in fact, she might even be wise to make the running herself and not even put him in the position where he had to ask. As a result, Emma found herself out on dates most evenings and had to pretend to like it.

There was a knock on my door and she came in with my first morning coffee. "Thank you," I said, studying one of the letters. "How was your evening last night?"

"Oh, fine, thank you," she said, fingering the waistband of her knickers, a little habit of hers.

I put the letter down and looked at her. She had a fine body. "Anybody in particular?" I asked.

"Um, Simon from Accounts. We went to the cinema."

"That's just about everybody on the paper you've been out with now, plus half of our customers," I teased her gently. "Not bad in three months."

"Well, I, uh, you know how it is. Nothing much to do at nights."

"Of course. You and I will have to get together one of these evenings."

Her face went a little redder. Please don't forget that she was standing there in just a pair of frilly black knickers with her firm young boobs on show, so she wasn't exactly comfortable to start off with. "Yes, that would be nice," she lied.

"When are you free?" I pursued.

She fingered her waistband again as she thought. "How about next Monday?" she ventured. It was Wednesday today, so she was almost certainly booked up every night between now and then.

"That's fine," I said with a smile. "Say eight o'clock, my place? You know where I live."

"Yes," she said quietly, "I remember." It was, after all, where this had all started for her.