The Camp Warden stood atop a round silver platform, bobbing up and down a few feet above the ground where he could glare down at the new slave girls as they were marched into the hall and lined up before him. His one organic eye on the left side of his scaly snout glared cruelly while the augmented one buzzed and whirred, running over each of the bound, naked women in turn.

In her place in line, Rebecca had to fight the urge to automatically go to her knees in supplication. Now back in the slave camps, all the memories, the nightmares, the conditioning she’d been put through had come rushing back. She had to remind herself she was meant to be a fresh capture, just another poor girl taken on the wastes and brought to this hell for the first time. So she waited until one of the Cybersaur guards stalked down the line, giving each girl a sharp jab to the small of her back or a rough shove.

“On your knees, ssslavesss!” He growled. Rebecca grunted sharply into her gag as she was pushed down, her knees impacting painfully on the metal floor. Pretty soon all of the captives were kneeling, some weeping brokenly, others grunting angrily and glaring up at their captors, wishing they could resist, fight back somehow, but here, the Cybersaurs had all the power. The women were completely under their control. Their only choices were to submit, obey their cruel masters and suffer a little or to resist and suffer even more before they were made to submit in the end.

“Welcome, Ssslavesss!” The Warden hissed. “You ssshould feel lucky...you have been taken from your usseless, pathetic lives, wandering the wassstess of your old world. You will be given a new, gloriouss purposse...ssserving your betters...your massterss!”

Around Rebecca, the other girls whimpered and moaned in horror at his words. Rebecca made sure to add a few moans of her own. She didn’t have to try very hard to draw up some fear at the thought. Though she served them, reluctantly, Rebecca knew all too well what it was like to find herself helpless in their clutches, just another poor slave. At least she, unlike the rest of them, might have a chance to escape this place again.

“If you learn quickly, you will not sssuffer much...” The Warden had continued his speech while Rebecca had been thinking. “Perssonally...” The Warden hissed gleefully. “I hope there are ssome sstrong willed sslavess among you. It won’t make a difference in the end. But in the meantime, breaking you will be more fun…!”

The moans of the slaves mixed with the hissing laughter of the other guards. With roars and jabs, they brought the captives back to their feet and marched them from the room…

The next stage of their journey into slavery was just as Rebecca remembered. A cold, sterile room, not too dissimilar from a human medical examination room, though the only ones of those she’d seen in years were ruins long ago scavenged for medical supplies. Another Cybersaur who’s chromed arms had an insignia which supposedly marked him as a medical doctor among the lizards, went down the line of slaves, injecting each of them in turn.

Rebecca winced as the needle jabbed into her arm. After a second or so, the pain faded. When the Cybersaur doctor moved on, the tiny red dot that marked the injection was already starting to fade. In a few minutes, it would be completely gone. She remembered to gasp and grunt in shock through her gag at this. The injection contained nanites, designed to heal and rejuvenate the body. The one’s she’d been given back when she was a slave had run out sometime after her return to the wastes. As the new batch spread throughout her body, they went to work, closing up and healing the scrapes and bruises she’d acquired during both her captures. Even a few scars she’d picked up during her time wandering the wastes started to fade away.

Looking at some of the other women in line, Rebecca saw the same effect happening with them. “They must have improved them since I left.” She thought. The nanites hadn’t originally been designed to work with human biology, but the Cybersaurs had made great strides, studying their growing collection of slaves. Faces and bodies worn down by the rigors and hardships of the wastes seemed to de-age before her eyes and the oldest of the captives soon appeared no older then their late twenties at the most.

“It would almost make submitting to the cybersaur’s worth it...” Rebecca thought. “Almost...” The nanites could heal almost any injury, given time. But that also meant their captor’s didn’t need to hold back when it came to torturing and punishing their slaves. And, as she’d learned in the past, they took full advantage of it whenever they could.

The captives passed through that room through a doorway into a long, wide hall. Waiting for them were more cybersaurs, dozens of them. Each was in charge of one of the labor groups of slaves. The newest prisoners were about to be divided up between them.

There was no organized system for it. As the slaves marched past, their captors loomed over them, examining each girl in turn, trying to pick out the best of the bunch. Suddenly, one Cybersaur would lunge forward and seize one of the girls, giving a shout of “Mine!” hissing and baring their fangs as if daring their fellow ‘saurs to dispute their claim to this particular slave.

Rebecca had only gone a half dozen paces before she was violently seized by the arm and jerked out of the group. As she stumbled after the ‘saur who had claimed her, another roughly snatched her by the other arm and started tugging her the other way.

“Thiss isss my ssslave!” The first Cybersaur roared. “Get your own!”

“No!” The second shot back. “I ssaw her firsst! Sshe’ss mine!” In between them, Rebecca was shook back and forth as they each struggled over her. She gave a frightened whimper, worried she might he ripped apart. Indeed, it looked like the two were squaring for a fight, hunching over, baring the claws on their free hands, ready to rip and tear each other and likely caring little if the unlucky slave in between them got in the way.

Things might have gone that way, had a third Cybersaur not stomped over to the commotion. “Ssince you can’t decide, I will decide for you...the ssslave belongss to me!” The other two hissed angrily, but the newcomer stood a full head taller then either of them and the shiny cybernetic arms and eye piece marked him as a high ranking Cybersaur. Hanging their heads, they both let go of Rebecca and stomped off to see if they could grab one of the few remaining new girls in line.

Meanwhile, Rebecca stood, trembling slightly as the one who had claimed her loomed over her. Her immediate instinct, one painfully taught by the whip and other tortures, was to go down on her knees, head bowed low before her master, but such a response would give her away. She was supposed to be a freshly captured wastelander, meeting her scaly masters for the first time. So she forced herself to remain standing and looked up, eyes wide with fright, even as her broken and trained subconscious told her such defiance would only bring swift and painful punishment.

For his part, the Cybersaur seemed to take her slight defiance in stride. He’d seen it, and worse, often enough when other fresh catches were brought in. The slight grin separating his toothy jaws told Rebecca he was looking forward to teaching her and the other new slaves proper respect for their new masters, among other things.

Rebecca gave a muffled gasp as one clawed hand went to her right breast and squeezed it hard. Tiny pin pricks of pain flashed through her as his claws sank in. The nanites healed the small wounds almost as fast as they were made. Meanwhile, his hands continued to roam over her, his claws tracing temporary lines across her naked skin. She trembled as it neared her crotch and her helpless sex. Rebecca screamed, a mixture of pain and pleasure. She hadn’t forgotten that part of the training either.

The cybersaur grinned as he played with her. Rebecca had been enslaved to the saurs long enough to know he was aroused and she wondered if he planned to take her here and now. She could hear the screams and squeals of other girls as that got that rough introduction to their new lives. Instead, he took hold of the young woman and dragged her through the mob.

Rebecca had never understood what made her and other human females so attractive to the Cybersaurs, members of another species. From small snatches of conversation overhead, she knew only a handful of Cybersaur females had gotten the cybernetic upgrades required for time travel before the meteor had destroyed their world and fewer still had survived the dangerous jump to the future. She’d never seen one herself though she understood they were so different from human females in form.

As she understood, the remaining females were kept locked away someplace secure, the males treated their own females little better then the females of the race they had conquered, as breeders reserved for the highest ranking Cybersaurs and it would be decades at least before a new generation came of age. In the meantime, she guessed, the rest of the cybersaurs had to content themselves with the human females, something they seemed perfectly content with.

Beyond the crowd, two more girls were standing in a huddle, one of them Katie. Had they anywhere to go, they might have tried to flee, but with no options they stayed where they were, trembling in fright. That none of the other Cybersaurs had dared poach the two unguarded slaves while their current master was taking Rebecca told her everything she needed to know about who had claimed the three of them.

For a moment, it looked like their Master might try his luck at grabbing a fourth slave, but it seemed he had decided three new girls were enough for now. There were only a couple girls left, with plenty of Cybersaurs already fighting over them.

With barely more then a bark of “Come!” their master turned and started clanking away. Rebecca glanced over at the other two. She gave a muffled grunt through her gag, nodding her head in his direction. After a second, the other girls got the hint. The three of them hurried after the Saur. Their movements were hindered by the shackles on their feet, not that he made any allowances for those. Rebecca knew from experience he was eager for any chance to punish the new girls, the first of many they could expect here.

Back out of the large chamber the small group went. Ahead of them, some of the other Cybersaurs were leaving, having claimed a slave or two. Though this facility was laid out differently from the one Rebecca had been trained in and still visited in her nightmares, she quickly guessed they were heading to one of the large cell blocks, presumably to join with the other slaves already owned by their new master.

Sure enough, they once more entered the long line of cages, some emptied of their occupants, others still full. Eventually they were brought to a halt in front of one of the full cages. “Welcome your new sssistersss, ssslavess.” The Cybersaur said, raising one arm up to the cage door. With a beep, it unlocked and slid open. “Ssshow them an example of how to behave themssselvesss from now on...”

All of the girls in the cage had evidently been prisoners of the Cybersaurs long enough to know what was expected of them. As the cage door slid open, they lined up, heads bowed submissively as they filed up to stand for the master’s inspection. A few flinched as he passed by, reaching out to grab a naked breast or pat their belly or thigh, often leaving claw marks which were swiftly erased by the healing nanites.

Rebecca stood by, watching the others carefully. Somehow, slaves were escaping from this facility, and frequent enough it wasn’t just a one off escape. There was a secret route out of here and she needed to find it, otherwise her stay here would end up being a permanent one. Any of these girls might know about it, or could point her in the right direction. Though naturally the slaves opportunities for socializing were...limited, enough went on she could start to find out.

Rebecca’s eyes reached the far end of the line, then widened in surprise when she saw one of the other slaves glaring back at her. It was that same girl again, the one she’d seen coming in. Having had some time to settle in her mind, she could now put a name to the face: Meredith Blake, a homesteader.

There’d been three of them, the mother, big sis and Meredith, scraping out a living on a little farm up in the hills, safe and secluded. Rebecca had stumbled across them, been offered a hot meal and a bed for the night. In exchange, she’d offered them a bottle of pre-war liquor, a rare treat these days. The drugs Rebecca had put in it had them out before they’d even realized what was happening. When they’d come to, she’d had them stripped, collared, gagged and cuffed and led them back to her base at the time. A week later she’d handed over all three of them to the cybersaurs.

Briefly Rebecca wondered if the other two Blake’s were still here, in separate cells. Very likely. The cybersaurs probably cared little about seperating one family among countless they’d enslaved and once in here few ever left. But they weren’t a problem, Meredith was. If she could pass the word about Rebecca, she’d be lynched by the rest of the slaves before the day was out, forget about earning their trust enough to find out how they were escaping. Worse, the nanites would just bring her back again for round two.

“Still, she hasn’t said anything yet...” Rebecca mused, thinking fast. “Not with that gag, which gives me until the evening feeding time to think of something...” There wasn’t much she could do to her, not permanently, but keeping Meredith away from the rest of the slaves, where she couldn’t tell them what she knew about Rebecca would do. “If I could get her in trouble...” Rebecca thought, “send her to the punishment chambers.”

All the slaves lived in dread of the punishment chambers. Bad as their normal lot was, the cybersaurs somehow made those chambers even worse. And a slave who ended up there rarely made it out in less then a month. Hopefully that would be long enough. “Just have to find the opportunity to get her in trouble...” That would be easy enough, the Cybersaur’s rarely needed much excuse to punish their captives. “Trick is doing so without getting myself punished as well.”

While she was plotting, their master had finished his inspection. Rebecca and the other new captives were added to the end of the line, then the whole group was set moving. “Where are we going now?” Rebecca wondered. If this training center was run the same as the one she’d been enslaved at previously, and she had no reason to doubt it was, the slaves had a regular schedule of grueling labor, degradation and torture they went through each week. “Where in the schedule are we now?” Rebecca thought.

“Slave training, labor, or...” she shuddered. “to serve as entertainment...” Heads bowed, the slaves trundled onwards...