“Who are they?” Lyra asked, still breathless from the receding sexual arousal.
The woman shook her head. “None of us know. Never heard of them, never seen them. Never seen anything like their tech.”
“How’d they get you?” Lyra asked.
“Me and my shipmates were captured at the Sigma Ori Cluster. We had no chance against them—ours was just a survey ship.”
“You weren’t far from us,” Lyra said. “We were stationed in Barnard’s Loop. My crew are mostly researchers from Copernicus, but I’m the pilot.” She held out her hand to shake. “Lyra Hallas.”
“Hadiza Moreau.” The other woman grasped her by the wrist, in the Kepleran style of greeting. Lyra had never been to the planet Kepler, but she’d met enough of the denizens, and she quickly adjusted to the other woman’s gesture, grasping her wrist in return.
“So what do you know about them?” Lyra asked, nodding upwards, indicating their abductors.
Hadiza shrugged. “Very little. They’re sentient anthropoids. And based on their tech, way more advanced than humans. More advanced than Ravanoth, even. Central nervous systems, warm-blooded. Mammalian attributes, but that’s going off surface characteristics. Their saliva induces sexual catatonia… but whether the agent is chemical, viral, parasitic, or something else, is anyone’s guess. It may have some relation to the Caerks’ venom.”
Caerks were a non-sentient species on the subplanet Parrh. They somewhat resembled Earth porcupines—except their quills were coated in a venom that induced sexual hallucinations in vertebrates. The venom was harvested and sold as an illegal recreational drug, known by its street name, Slick.
Before her military commission, Lyra had tried Slick once. She’d experienced a vivid hallucination of being tenderly fucked by a faceless, hard-bodied stranger. He had given her the longest, most powerful orgasm she’d ever had. The whole dream had seemed only an hour long—and the orgasm had taken most of it. But when she woke from the drug’s hold, it was to discover that eighteen hours had passed. She’d pissed herself, she was dangerously dehydrated, her face was numb, and for three days afterwards she couldn’t stop drooling. She’d never touched the stuff again
“Are you a researcher?” Lyra asked Hadiza.
“No, a physician.” After a beat, she clarified, “I have some experience with non-human species, but my medical expertise is on human physiology. I was an Alliance Defense Force corpsman first, then they sent me to med school. I’m mostly a trauma surgeon.”
Despite the current circumstances, Lyra found herself smiling. “The ADF is how I got my wings. I did transpo and surveillance for my first enlistment. Second enlistment I was pulled for the Black Astros.”
Hadiza whistled. “You were a Black Astro? And now you’re carting a bunch of pencil-pushers around the ass-end of the universe? What changed?”
Lyra shrugged, trying not to let emotion show in her face, her voice. “I got custody of my little sister. I needed to find something safer, somewhere she could live with me.”
Hadiza nodded her understanding.
“So what about you?” Lyra asked. “You went from stuffing soldiers’ guts back inside them to patching surveyors’ boo-boos? That’s quite a change.”
It was Hadiza’s turn to shrug. “Turns out I don’t have the stomach for watching kids die.”
A heavy silence settled over them both.
Overhead, the women still in the clutches of the aliens’ venom continued to scratch at the sealed hatch, begging plaintively for the return of their captors. The sound was like a needle in Lyra’s eardrum. She shook off a shudder.
“Do they ever—” Lyra swallowed past the fury that rose, tightening her throat. “Do they use their venom to…”
“They haven’t yet.”
Lyra didn’t want to dwell on the possible horrors awaiting them. She wanted to get out. She wanted to fight. “Do they ever open the hatch?” she asked.
“Only to bring in more captives.”
“What about water? They’ve got to give us water.”
Hadiza pointed to the forward bulkhead. “There are cisterns there. The water’s clean. It doesn’t do anything to us—that we can detect, anyway.”
“Have you tried to fight?” Lyra asked, turning back to the others.
“With what?” Hadiza replied on a bemused snort. “They’re more than two feet taller than us, at least a hundred pounds heavier, and their skin is like armor.”
“Armor isn’t invincible,” Lyra said, resisting the sudden need to scratch at her scar. “Did you have anything useful on you when you were taken? I’ve just got this.”
She reached into her flight suit and pulled out a packet of chewing gum and the small sextant she used for manual astrometry. Made of a high density carbon alloy, the sextant was shaped like a pie slice, but only spanned the width of Lyra’s palm. The pointed end could certainly inflict some damage in a pinch, but she doubted it’d have much effect on their hard-skinned captors.
Hadiza sat up straight, ignoring the contents of Lyra’s pockets. “Wait. You’re a pilot.”
Heads lifted among the other women in the hold, gazes settling hopefully on Lyra’s pale face.
“Yes,” Lyra answered, trying not to crush those hopes too forcefully. “But there isn’t much in the way of flight control down here.”
“What if we got you out of the hold?” Hadiza asked.
“How are you going to do that? Fight them?” another woman interrupted, more weary than scornful.
“We don’t have to fight,” Hadiza said, speaking slowly as she worked through her thoughts out loud. “They definitely want to fuck us. Whatever they do to us, it’s not one-sided. We could… you know. Seduce them.”
Nervous, slightly hysterical laughter rippled through the crowd of women.
Hadiza didn’t laugh. She sat up straighter. “If we got them to let us out of the hold… if the rest of us distracted them, Lyra could hijack the flight controls.”
“I don’t know if I can—” Lyra began.
“But how far would we get?” a voice demanded, ignoring Lyra’s objections. “We can’t distract them forever. It would only take one of them to envenomate us, and then we’re back to square one.”
“We know when they dock,” said a woman as pale as Lyra, her hair the color of fire. “The lights brighten in the hold. If we could somehow seal them out of the ship—”
“And leave them to torture the women of whatever new vessel they hijack?”
A guilty silence descended.
“They’re going to do it anyway,” somebody said softly. “No matter what we do.”
But nobody wanted to be the one to say it out loud—yes. We’ll leave them with their next victims.
Lyra swallowed down her guilt, and said it as obliquely as possible. “If we can get them locked out of the ship, there’s a chance I could figure out how to pilot it.”
So it was settled.
Time had no meaning in the dim, unchanging confinement of the alien ship’s hold. A few hours may have passed. Or maybe a couple days. But at last, the lights rose, filling the hold with a daylight glow.
Lyra blinked and sat up, looking around at the other women. The well-lit details of their faces made them seem like new people—frightened, gaunt, unwashed strangers rather than the shadowed comrades Lyra had plotted with in the darkness.
“Have we landed?” she whispered. “I didn’t feel anything.”
Hadiza looked around, frowning. “When they took your vessel, there was an impact. We all felt it. I’m not sure—”
The hum of the engines was a sound so subtle, that Lyra hadn’t even realized it was there until she heard them power down. Nervous murmurs rippled through the women in a patchwork of languages.
As the engines died down to silence, the ship’s gravitational generator faded away as well. But Lyra and the other women did not float off the deck in zero-gravity.
“We’ve landed on a planet,” Lyra said.
/> There was a noise above them.
Lyra scrambled to her feet. “Ready?” she asked the assembled women, her voice hoarse with nerves.
Muttered affirmatives returned to her in Creole.
Lyra was the tallest woman in the hold, and as such, had been given the position of first engagement. She had the closest odds of matching their captor’s towering physiques and getting face to face with one of them. Even if she hadn’t been the tallest, Lyra would’ve argued for the spot. She didn’t like to leave her fate in the hands of others.
She climbed the ladder quickly and shoved the makeshift mouthguard into place, sealing her lips over it tightly. Made of bits and pieces of their collective pocket debris—an entire tube of waxy lip balm and a chewed piece of gum pressed over a strip of card stock ripped from her gum packet—it formed tightly against her teeth and lips.
A few of the other women had similar guards, but they hadn’t had enough supplies for everyone. The others had to do their best to keep their mouths as tightly closed as possible. Those who had mouth guards—Hadiza, Inri, a surveyor from Hadiza’s crew named Sonya, and a Kuiper woman who seemed to be called Nantik—climbed up behind Lyra. They crowded the ladder together, clustered like grapes on a vine. More women climbed the ladder beneath them.
The noise of movement continued above the hatch, and Lyra waited breathlessly for it to open. She clung to the ladder with shaking hands, palms slick with sweat.
She heard the sound of a seal releasing, and then a line appeared in the smooth surface overhead. The shape of the hatch followed the track of light outlining it, and then it was open.
Blue light spilled in from the passageway above. Lyra had a momentary impression of leaden skin before she surged upward. The three aliens standing over the hatch recoiled from her as if she were carrying a lethal disease. Her impulse was simply take off running, but the logical part of her mind beat the animal fear into submission. She had to follow the plan.
Keeping her lips tightly sealed over her mouthguard, she leapt towards the nearest alien body. He backed into the bulkhead as she threw her arms around his broad shoulders, hauling herself up his big body until they were face to face. In the periphery of her vision, she saw the other four women working in tandem to corner the other two aliens.
The male she held onto had a body as hard as a marble statue. His long, coarse hair was a lighter gray than his skin, streaked with threads of black. His eyes, yellow as saffron, stared at her, the pupils so dilated that Lyra could almost forget they were elliptical.
He grasped at her torso, struggling to peel her off of him. He was handling her carefully, though. Lyra realized he was trying not to injure her. Using that to her advantage, she clung as tenaciously as a leech, wrapping her legs around his waist and burying her face in the crook of his shoulder.
Behind her, the rest of the captives flooded out of the hold, climbing the ladder as fast as birds in flight. They spilled into the passageway, surrounding the three alien males—caging them in with sinuous, writhing bodies and caressing hands.
Lyra felt the rise of an erection pressing against her abdomen. The alien was no longer resisting her embrace, but grinding against her.
Phase one complete. Onto phase two. She twisted out of the alien male’s grasp and dropped to the deck, falling back through the press of the other women. They swarmed in to fill the space she’d vacated, overwhelming the already overwhelmed male.
Lyra hurried onward, into the open space of the passageway. Behind her, Hadiza, Inri, Sonya, and Nantik melted out of the swarm, faces flushed, clothing askew.
A woman’s breathy moan cut through the soft sound of scuffling bodies. Lyra looked back, her jaw clenched. It was one of her own crewmates—Ayanda—who hadn’t had a mouthguard. She clung to one of the males, kissing him with fervent, open-mouthed passion.
He was lost in her embrace, oblivious to everything except the little human woman in his massive arms. Ayanda grasped at the fastenings on his flight suit, pulling them open, sliding her hand inside and down, down, down, reaching for his—
Lyra looked away abruptly. This was a possibility that they had all accepted when they made their plan. Some of them would be envenomated. Some of them would sacrifice for their freedom. Lyra remembered the desperate need triggered by the venom, and could only hope that Ayanda would at least find pleasure in the sacrifice.
Every woman who was not occupied with one of the three aliens melted away from them, following Lyra and Hadiza forward.
It was an unknown alien ship, developed by an unknown alien species, but the layout and functionality of the vessel was, so far, not terribly unlike anything Lyra had seen before. The passageway curved, and then branched. To the left, a door. To the right, a ladder. Lyra tilted her head to the right, and the others followed.
On most ships, the bridge was on the uppermost deck, often slightly forward of center. It allowed the greatest field of visibility, even if visual navigation was a rare, mostly-obsolete method. Once upon a time, it been an important function, and with no particular reason to change, the bridge continued to be situated on the upper deck.
Lyra could only hope that this alien culture had developed their transport along a similar function. For all she knew, they kept their controls deep in the interior of the ship. Or maybe there were no controls at all. Maybe the ship was piloted by an automated program, whose manual overrides Lyra would have no hope of breaking into.
Stop panicking, she told herself firmly. Navigating the ship was still a distant obstacle. They first had to clear the ship of their captors. And while the others may have to sacrifice themselves to keep those captors distracted, it was of utmost importance that Lyra didn’t fall to the alien venom. Her expertise was everybody else’s only hope for escape.
Lyra sucked against her teeth, pulling the mouthguard more tightly flush against her teeth and gums. She pressed her lips together into a thin, hard line.
With an innate sense of orientation on a ship, Lyra led the way onward and upward. The ship was oddly quiet. There was no sign of their abductors, no sound of ordinary ship life.
At the third ascent, their luck ran out. Lyra stood above the hatch, helping the last woman up from the ladder, when a patrol of two of the aliens appeared at the end of the passageway. Monstrously tall, as gray and hard as iron, the sight of them inspired instant panic.
The aliens shouted in their growling language, surging down the passage towards the women.
Lyra reached for a weapon she didn’t have—the electrolaser pistol she strapped to her hip during surface contact. She swore as her hand brushed against smooth, unarmed flight suit.
Spinning away from the approaching enemy, she shoved at the cluster of women, urging them onward like an impatient collie.
“No!” Hadiza grabbed at Lyra, pulling her to the fore. “You’re the only one who can fly this thing.”
The aliens were on top of them almost instantly.
The other woman swarmed Lyra, forming a barrier. Two of them—a researcher from Lyra’s ship, and a crew member from Hadiza’s—leapt onto the alien males, clinging and grasping.
It went against every one of Lyra’s principles to let others fight for her—to abandon comrades.
Hadiza gave Lyra’s arm a violent jerk. “Hey. Soldier,” she snapped. “Remember the mission.”
Lyra straightened. “Run,” she barked at the others. Her mouthguard flew out, and there was no time to recover it. “Run!”
They sprinted down the passage. Lyra chanced a look over her shoulder. The women had succeeded in subduing the aliens—but they’d lost themselves to the venom. Lyra’s heart turned into a rock. She tore her gaze away from her fallen comrades.
The passage came to a T. Lyra cut to the left, towards another hatch. She reached to unseal it, but Hadiza shouldered in front of her. For someone so small, she was surprisingly strong.
“Let me,” Hadiza said, her tone brooking no argument. Lyra recognized sense when she saw it. Sh
e let Hadiza open the hatch.
The hatch opened to reveal another patrol. This time there were four of the massive, hard-bodied aliens. Lyra instinctively reached for Hadiza, pulling her back.
“Fall back!” Lyra barked. “Seal the hatch!”
“No!” Hadiza cried, struggling out of Lyra’s grasp. “We need to move forward. Come on!”
The other women hesitated. They were too frightened to run into the danger, and too rattled to gather their wits and run away. Instead, they stood like sheep, wide-eyed and helpless, looking from Hadiza to Lyra.
The hesitation cost them less than a second, but it was more time than they had. The aliens surged through the opening.
Face to the face with the enemy, the other women reacted like the cornered animals they were. They surged against the massive bodies, climbing them like cats on a tree.
Hadiza shoved at Lyra, pushing her beyond the occupied aliens and through the open hatch.
They emerged in a short passageway. The movement of air signaled a large, open space to Lyra’s senses. Only two other women came through with them—Inri, a researcher from Lyra’s crew, and Merrith, a surveyor from Hadiza’s crew. All the others had been envenomated along the way.
“Let’s go,” Lyra said gruffly, fighting the urge to turn back and drag each and every envenomated woman through the ship.
They could only turn left. The short passage opened into a large flight deck. A row of four silver shuttles docked along a locking track. The hangar door stood open to a planetary surface.
A wide jetway led from the hangar door down to the ground. Outside, it was night, but the light of flight deck flooded out, illuminating a dense forest of twisting, multicolored trees over uneven, boulder-strewn ground.
“Shuttles!” Merrith hissed. “Could you pilot a shuttle?”
Lyra stared bleakly at them. This whole operation had gone completely to shit. The majority of the women were still captive, with no hope of freeing them. The majority of the aliens were unaccounted for, spread out across the ship. There was no way to remove them from the ship.
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