Betrayed (Hidden Worlds Book 1) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  EBook Offer

  Betrayed

  Hidden Worlds Book One

  Bethany Burke

  Blushing Books

  ©2017 by Blushing Books® and Bethany Burke

  All rights reserved.

  No part of the book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Published by Blushing Books®,

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  Bethany Burke

  Betrayed

  EBook ISBN: 978-1-61258-491-1

  Print ISBN: 978-1-61258-506-2

  Cover Art by ABCD Graphics & Design

  This book is intended for adults only. Spanking and other sexual activities represented in this book are fantasies only, intended for adults. Nothing in this book should be interpreted as Blushing Books' or the author's advocating any non-consensual spanking activity or the spanking of minors.

  Contents

  What’s Inside

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  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Bethany Burke

  EBook Offer

  Blushing Books Newsletter

  Blushing Books

  What’s Inside

  Mareen had been sent out of the classroom; obviously as part of her punishment, she had to stand in the hall, with her nose to the wall next to the classroom door. Her tunic top was lifted, held around her waist, and with her hands, she held her white trousers parted. Her punished bottom glowed like a ruby, the red of the rose barely visible now, and she was snuffling miserable. She was squirming a little, rocking her hips back and forth slowly, and I noticed that she held her feet in an odd position, toes in, heels spread out.

  The men glanced at the sight, again grinning unabashedly. I was taken again, though, by their reactions. They were amused, certainly, but treated what we had just seen without much real emotion, as if the whole thing was interesting and funny, but not that unusual.

  I looked at Christy. Her blue eyes were as wide as mine felt. "We have to get out of here," I mouthed silently.

  "How?" she mouthed back, looking desperate.

  How indeed? We were guarded by three burly soldiers plus a hardly-petite Matron. This was obviously a prison of some sort. We'd come several hundred yards through it and had seen well enough that it was crawling with the Matron/guards. Before that we'd walked through a not-insubstantial town that resembled a maze more than anything else. To think that we could just sprint off and somehow find our way back to the ship was a prospect so ludicrous that it wasn't even worth contemplating. Intellectually, I knew that our only hope was to wait for a better opportunity. We'd had no training for situations like this… hostile encounters with locals. But common sense told me that I had no choice but to seem as docile as possible; it was the only way they might let down their guard.

  We turned a corner, and walked on through the dimly lit classroom building. As we walked on, I also saw further evidence of our captors' barbarism. Outside of several other classrooms I saw red-bottomed miscreants standing in the hall, just we'd seen Mareen. One here, one there, and in front of one classroom, five sniffing girls stood in a row, holding up white tunics, cherry red cheeks glowing. All stood with the same odd stance, leaning forward, noses to the wall, bottoms poking out, with their toes turned in, heels spread apart. I realized that the position caused not only their punished bottoms to be on show, but it caused their female parts to display partly open as well. Every single one bore on her left cheek an emblem of some sort. All were full color and just my quick, horrified glances told me that the markings appeared to be permanent, right into the skin.

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  Chapter 1

  "Do you mind?"

  I looked at the woman standing next to my table holding her meal tray expectantly. A patch over her left breast bore the insignia of navigator along with the name "MacCleod." Agreeably, I nodded my head towards the empty seat opposite mine. We hadn't met; MacCleod was part of the ship's crew and I was on the professional research staff, but I recognized her from preflight, primarily because she was the only other woman on board our small deep space Drakkon.

  "Marin, isn't it?"

  I swallowed my egg sandwich and stuck out my hand. "Yes… Jen Marin."

  "I'm Christy." Deftly, she moved her food carriers from the tray to the table. "Is this your first time out?"

  I shook my head. "Oh, no. You have to be system-certified before they let you go inter."

  "Of course," she nodded, a chagrined look on her face. "Guess I never paid much attention to the regs in Exploratory." She took a bite of her food. " Are you Anthro?"

  "No. Linguistics."

  Christy furrowed her forehead. "I thought this planet was English-speaking." I looked up sharply and she shrugged with a half-apologetic smile. "Bed-time reading."

  "I'm impressed. The flight crews I've worked with in the past couldn't care less…" I groped for a polite way of phrasing the thought, "…about the research parameters." It was true. Most flight crew members were nothing but dumb space jocks, who'd joined the servic
e because they thought it would give them adventure. When they found out that, from the inside of a transport, space travel looked about the same as it did from the inside of a simulator, boredom set in quickly, and they resigned themselves to taking the professionals where they wanted to go, playing cards and grumbling about delays until it was time to go back. I'd never met a crew member yet who'd evinced any interest whatsoever in the social parameters of the destination.

  She shrugged, seemingly oblivious to my perusal. "I thought about Anthro at upper, but my Dad was Unit…"

  "Unit!" My hand shook and coffee I'd been sipping sloshed everywhere.

  She gave me a glance as if I'd just hatched out of a fetal unit. "Of course. Didn't you know this was a military transport?"

  "No!" I felt embarrassed, but I was so astonished at the information that there was no way I could hide my ignorance. From Christy's knowing comment about the planet being English-speaking, and now this, it seemed she knew a lot more about what was going on than I did. "Why is this a military transport?"

  "Gamma Rigel 2 is an unsecured planet." She paused, scratching her nose. "A ten. I can't believe you don't know this."

  I sighed, hardly knowing where to start. "Well, actually, I was slotted into this flight twenty-four hours prior to depart. I really haven't had time to look over the data."

  Christy set her cup down and licked her lips. "I was slotted in twelve hours prior," she said. "Guess we both got a surprise." She paused, then looked at me curiously. "I've talked to the other crew, you know. This mission's been on the schedule logs for six months. Doesn't it seem strange that we both were added to the roster so close to depart?"

  "I don't know. Not really. Exploratory seems pretty disorganized, on the whole." I reached for my fork, then set it down. "But I'll tell you what is odd. This may be an unsecured planet, but what do we need a military crew for… if we're not setting down?"

  Her fork halted mid-way to her mouth. "Not setting down? Where did you get that idea?"

  "I was told this mission was remotes only."

  Christy MacCleod shook her head somberly. "Not as far as I know. Like you said, why would you need military if you weren't going to land?"

  Why indeed? The question came back to me later, as I sat in my cabin tapping through files of data on my reader screen. I was a linguist, a junior faculty member at Uneversity Segment 9 on the European continent. Although I was space-certified and had done some research off-Earth, my field was historical English. Most linguists felt that by documenting forward changes in a language, much could be learned about historical changes as well. Gamma Rigel had been both entirely English-speaking and completely isolated for over three centuries. It met the criteria perfectly and I had jumped at the chance to collect field data.

  Gamma Rigel had been a prison colony. Like the majority of the colonies that Earth had developed in the twenty second, it had not been set up as a scientific venture. The colonies been developed to hold two groups of people: the bulk of Earth's population from the third world nations and the entire underclass from the developed countries. About 90% of Earth's population had been moved off-Earth through either coerced or forced emigration during that century, to save the mother planet which was on the verge of ecological and political collapse.

  In order to protect Earth militarily, the colonists had been denied the technology that had placed them on the planets to begin with. With little more than domestic animals, seeds, a few crude tools, and the clothing on their backs, they'd been abandoned. Denied all support from Earth, the colonists on every planet had been reduced to subsistence living. It was felt to be crucial that no planet could develop, ever, the means for space travel. This would protect Earth forever.

  Many of the colonies had been monitored carelessly, if at all, and the only thing the monitoring crews were trained to look for was evidence of developing technology. As long as the planets stayed primitive, that was all anyone cared about. The prevailing attitude on the Earth through the twenty third and the twenty fourth had been "Good riddance;" What these people actually did, how they fared, even if they lived or died, was of no interest whatsoever.

  Life on Earth was peaceful, wonderful, idyllic. With a population reduced to less than three hundred million, about the same as twenty first America, food was plentiful, air and water pristine. There were strict population controls; no couple was permitted more than three children and most chose to have only one or two. Since many people had no children at all, the population was barely holding steady.

  However, late in the twenty fourth, scientific curiosity was rekindled. Many of the colonies had developed unique social systems. Intellectuals on Earth realized that the study of the colony planets could be fascinating, living labs of anthropology, sociology, and linguistics. Throughout the twenty-fifth, it became ever more fashionable to join a research unit. It was dangerous work at times, for often the research involved visiting the surfaces of hostile planets in local guise. However, as the decades passed, the government on Earth had been able quietly to "plant" leaders on most of the planet, on-site monitors who guided the societies, helped make them safe for Earth researchers, and also quietly ferreted out any colonial scientist who might be moving too quickly towards developing sophisticated technology.

  I knew that Gamma Rigel, one of the most distant colonies, had been monitored only very sketchily, and as I tapped through the data, it became obvious to me that only the barest outlines of information were known. General population numbers, where towns and cities were located, what sort of agriculture was practiced… that sort of physical data was available, but not much else. The last monitoring mission had been six years earlier and had utilized remotes only. Gamma Rigel's ranking as a "ten" meant that it was completely unsecured. We had no secret, on-site observers whatsoever.

  Nevertheless, Gamma Rigel was one of the most socially advanced colonies. It had been colonized by criminals, to be sure, but mostly non-violent offenders. Here apparently, Earth had sent men and women convicted of fraud, embezzlement, political crimes, et cetera, as opposed to violent crimes. Such criminals, it seemed to follow, had been better educated to begin with. In addition, the original group had been tiny, only around 1000. Apparently, Gamma Rigel's colonization had begun at the very tail-end of the transport programs, and through some bureaucratic foul-up, a large convoy of colonists designated for Gamma Rigel had inexplicably been sent somewhere else. By the time the mistake was discovered, there really were no more colonists to send out. Gamma Rigel was left with only its very small, trial group. Given the small numbers, the education level of the colonists, as well as the fact that they all shared a single language, and it made sense that Gamma Rigel, in three hundred years, would develop into a very interesting place.

  I'd seen vids of some of the other colonies, places where half-clothed savages were still coshing each other over the head with stone hatchets. By contrast, Gamma Rigel, at least physically, resembled Europe in mid-second millennium. From the vids, I could see that the architecture and town construction on the part of the planet that was inhabited was reminiscent of that era, and, in addition, there seemed to be much small-scale warfare, again similar to medieval Europe.

  I squinted on my data screen at a rather poorly enhanced vid, but its content was clear enough. Two groups of men, perhaps sixty in all, were engaged in a battle. A few were on horseback, and all wore a linked leather and metal armor. Swords flailed and arrows flew, and in spite of its poor quality, the spectacle was riveting. The men all appeared very powerful, and as I had that thought, I remembered another brief fact that I'd seen somewhere in the data. Turning off the vid, I flipped through… and found it.

  For some reason, it appeared that over the three-hundred and fifty years of Gamma Rigel's colonization, human stature had increased substantially, six percent, if evidence gathered from the vids was to be believed. That translated into an average increase of four inches for men and three for women. No one knew why. Such a thing was not without p
recedent. On Earth, cultures that began eating a great deal of meat and other protein foods had experienced an even larger increase… about eight percent, during the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth. But preliminary evidence from Gamma Rigel was that their diet was not particularly heavy in meat… they ate mostly grains and vegetables. Something in the water or air, perhaps? It certainly was curious.

  I found myself torn between being fascinated with this colony and very glad I'd come along on the mission yet still quite concerned that something was just not right about my presence. Initially, I'd been told that I'd been selected for the trip to Gamma Rigel at the last minute because someone else had opted out, and I'd never hesitated about accepting; something unusual like this only increased my chances for tenure. However, I wasn't certified for a landing crew when the planet was ranked above a six. Unit had their own research staff, trained for potentially hostile encounters, that went along for initial forays into unsecured nines and tens.

  I had thought that I would be supervising the collection of the data via the remotes, tiny cameras and recorders that were dropped down to the surface to record the sights and sounds of the planet. There was no reason, of course, why I could not still do that, but the presence of the Unit Landing Crew was very mysterious indeed. At the beginning of the flight we'd been put into suspended for sixteen days, and I now had just two more days before we would arrive at Gamma Rigel. Not a lot of time, but certainly enough to do a more thorough review of the data and talk to both Christy MacCleod and the ship's Primo a few more times.