by Calista Skye
The machine whirrs to life and starts working.
Why did I turn into the Combat form? It usually just happens before or during battles, when the war platoon is whipped up into a raging frenzy and we all Change. Only extreme anger can trigger it. Why did trading Althea to the Glup make me so furious?
Once I enter Combat form, I have no control. The monster takes over, and it’s a most instinctive being that just kills. That’s all it can do. That’s why it exists. Changing outside of war is just about unknown. And yet, there I was. Going crazy with a gang of Glup, of all things.
Oh, the sheer bliss of it! Feeling the power fill me up, becoming more, becoming strong enough to rip the world itself apart. Letting go of control and seeing how great a warrior I am when I just let instinct rule. Feeling the enemy being crunched underfoot, hearing their cries, seeing them flee. The glory of that experience! Truly, I pity the lesser beings who are never allowed to feel that. How empty and meaningless the world must be to them.
I glance over at Althea. The curious fur on her head does have a certain allure. Perhaps it’s there to give the male something to hold on to, to direct her body when he’s taking his pleasure from her. Like when one rides a wild niryx.
My crotch swells again. It’s something I shall try. With Althea. Now that I appear to be stuck with her, she has to compensate for the money we lost. I would never have turned into Combat form if she hadn’t been there. One way or the other, she has to make up for it.
Is she a witch, perhaps? Did she use some kind of magic on me, to prevent me from selling her?
She is an alien. Who knows what she’s capable of.
The machine delivers a plate of steaming stew, and I bring it over to Althea and place it on the table in front of her like a common servant.
It makes me frown. Why am I serving her? On a table, even, not on the floor.
“Eat,” I command.
She leans over towards the table. “What is this?”
“That is food.”
“I mean, what kind of food?”
“The kind you eat.”
She sniffs it, then touches the stew with one finger. “It’s cold.”
First I’m serving her a meal, and now she’s complaining about it? A growl escapes my throat.
“Which is fine,” Althea says hurriedly. “I prefer to eat cold food.”
She cautiously puts her finger under her little nose, then into her mouth. “Okay. Not bad. Pretty—” She collapses in a coughing fit, and I growl again.
“Pretty spicy,” she continues, with her eyes running. “But good. Yes. Delicious. Thank you. You don’t have a spoon, do you? Or a knife. Something to… you know. Make it easier to eat.”
I get a short dagger from the weapons storage and hand it over.
“Yes,” she says with fake enthusiasm. “A long sword is exactly right. Perfect.” She accepts it with both hands and laboriously puts the point of it into the stew, then withdraws it and sniffs it again. “It’s good,” she assures me. “It’s just that we might have different physiologies. Food that nourishes you might kill me. And the other way around. I just have to make sure…”
“It’s safe,” I state. “The machine only makes the blandest of foods. Everything that comes out is sterile and so safe you could feed a vrinsk pup with it.”
She sucks the food from the end of the dagger and chews. “It actually is really good. If it won’t kill me, that’s even better.” At last, she chews with some energy, using the dagger to scoop the stew with.
I watch her eat, and somehow even that stirs something in me. Her white teeth, her smooth jaw, the way I can just barely make out her muscles play under the soft skin of her cheeks…
I tear my gaze away. Bleep is right. We have a problem. The Glup not reporting us for that ridiculously blatant violation of the rules was a lucky break. But still, we’re in dire need of resources to continue the Competition. Can we sell Althea to someone else? Can we loot this primitive colony for valuables? Can we find metal that we can sell for scrap? Are there more human females here that we can capture and sell?
Probably not. There is a market for slaves from newly discovered sentient species, but the auction houses are too far away from this backwater. The closest one is Bununun Orbital, and we’d deplete most of our remaining fuel going there.
Keeping Althea as a pleasure slave for myself is an option. And it’s an option that’s looking a little too tempting. If she has the power to make me go into Combat form, then she’s far too dangerous to have around.
Althea looks at me with those dark eyes. “You didn’t answer my question.”
“What?”
“I asked you about your Competition.”
“And something makes you think I’ll answer now?”
She shrugs with her tiny shoulders and keeps eating. “Just making conversation.”
She’s too spirited for her own good. Any other female I’ve known would have been quite beaten after having just one of the experiences Althea has had today. She would have groveled at my feet, begging for merciful treatment. Althea seems to have recovered already. Her nipples are dark under the thin white fabric.
“We are engaged in a Competition,” I confirm. “We are doing well.”
“Doesn’t sound like it.”
Yes, she’s got some of her energy back. The substances I added to the food are starting to work. I just hope I didn’t use too much. “It is in the nature of Competitions like this that they ebb and flow. It may not look to you as if we’re doing well. But we are in the lead.”
“What’s the prize?”
“Many things of great value.”
“Uh-huh. Very secretive. So what happened out there? You first wanted to sell me, then changed your mind and turned into a rancor?”
“I didn’t change my mind. It was changed for me.”
She puts another daggerful of food into her mouth. “That has to be the same thing.”
“Did you really enjoy the whipping I gave you that much? With the tone you’re using toward me, you’re on the way to another one.”
“I will use any tone I want to a slaver who just tried to sell me to a bunch of alien spiders.”
She’s so calm when she says it, it chills my blood. No female in her position should be talking like that. Not everyone is as understanding as me.
“It’s better if you’re demure and respectful,” I explain with the patience of an angel. “The universe is very dangerous for small females.”
“So, when you’re in that monster form,” she ignores me, “how does that feel? It looks pretty weird. Dangerous, but weird. And kind of sexy.”
I sigh. I have given her too much of the mood-enhancing substances. So hard to gage the miniscule amounts it takes for a being of her tiny stature. Now she’ll be vocalizing every little thought she has.
The door slides open and Bleep zooms in, throwing a new pair of pants at me in a way that’s just short of disdainful. “Here. Got you some new ones. And I have to tell you that I’m nervous. The Glup are still here on this planet. They didn’t lodge a formal complaint to the referee, but it’s a really bad sign that they haven’t left. They’re not done with us. I want to take off and leave. Ditch that egg layer, and we’ll be on our way.”
I pull the pants on, having some trouble with it because my cock seems to be always at least at half stiffness whenever Althea is near. “And the fuel issue?”
“I ran the numbers. It’s bad, but not disastrous. We’ll just have to deal with it and hope that the next race is pretty damn close to here. If we win one more, we might be hard to catch, even if it is our last one.”
My mood brightens a little. There is a chance. Just a small one. “Very well. We can still make it.”
“No thanks to you. Okay, so— wait. Incoming communication from the Glup. Decoding... ‘Surrender the goods or be destroyed.’ Damn it! They’re coming. Full battle formation across the surface. No, this is too much. We have to get away now.”
She zips back to the control room, and the ship starts shaking before it takes off from the surface and hovers while the main drive heats up.
“What’s going on?” Althea asks, not too concerned.
“We are leaving.”
“And my friends at the colony?”
I’m confused. “Yes?”
“You’re just going to leave them to the spider people?”
22
- Althea -
He doesn’t even shrug. “They are none of our concern.”
I don’t like his nonchalant attitude toward my friends. “They are absolutely my concern. If you’re not going to help them, then I demand to be set down so I can be with them.”
I don’t put much force in it. I don’t know if it’s the endless bouts of panic I’ve had today or the sex or the orgasms, but I’m feeling pretty mellow. Even being abducted by a huge monster alien and his tame space Tinker Bell doesn’t get me all worked up. Still, I’m concerned about the guys at the colony. They must think the world is about to end. And who knows what those giant spiders have in mind for them.
Brox doesn’t respond, and I grab the stupid collar around my neck with both hands and try to pull it apart. But it’s made from some tough plastic-like material and won’t budge.
“At least take this off of me,” I plead. I should really be super mad at him for what he did, trying to sell me to spiders. But then he turned into a monster and just killed most of them, so I don’t really know what to think. I’m not really on top of events right now.
He sends me a short glance. “It will stay on until you have—”
There’s a huge bang, and the whole ship starts shaking and jiggling so hard I’m tossed from the cushions onto the floor.
Brox is still standing, reaching up to the ceiling to keep steady. I have no idea how he does it — I’m having to cling to the floor to not be shaken around.
A very alien siren goes off somewhere, and the light turns so bright I have to close my eyes.
“We’re going down,” the female robot’s bright voice says from somewhere. “Hold on to something! We’re going to crash into the planet!”
The floor tilts so hard, I slide fast towards the opposite wall, squealing and trying desperately to find something to hold on to. It feels like I’m on a rollercoaster, with that weird sucking feeling in my stomach. Then I think I hit the ceiling with my butt, then a wall. It all happens very fast, but I’m pretty sure I’m tumbling wildly in here. This could get dangerous.
Suddenly, there’s a heavy weight on me, pinning me down. A very blue weight, I just have time to notice before the whole ship resonates with a bang and starts to tremble like a cymbal being hit by some gigantic drummer.
Then I completely engulfed in warm blue, and I lose track of what exactly is happening. There are horrific bangs and trembling and tumbling and all kinds of wild jerks and crashing, but I’m being cushioned from the violent movements.
Finally, everything is quiet, except a slow banging in my ear, like a bass drum doing some kind of double tap. I’m still pinned down with blue warmth on every side.
Then Brox gets off me and stands up. He has to bend almost double to fit in here now. The ceiling that used to be domed is now reaching down in a huge irregular dent.
I check on myself. I appear to have no broken bones or even bruises.
Brox also seems to be no worse for wear, except the spot where I shot him. It looks inflamed and painful, and the angry red contrasts with the blue in a way that I don’t like.
The floor is tilted at a steep angle.
“I think we crashed,” I offer weakly.
Brox just grunts.
“We’ve crashed,” the voice of the robot confirms over some kind of speaker. “We’re on the surface of the planet. We were shot down by the Glup. And I would assume that was not just for revenge. It’s not their style. They want something from us. I wonder if you can guess what it is, Brox? Something soft and pinkish, maybe? With fur on the head and the pussy? Just guessing here.”
Brox makes his way to the door and tries to open it. It resists, and he kicks it open with a casual swing of the leg that rips the door off its alien hinges and propels it out like the cork of a champagne bottle. He sticks his head out.
I carefully get to my feet, too. My legs will just about carry me, but my knees are trembling like crazy.
Brox jumps out of the ship. There’s no walkway, and the ground is ten feet down. Not a huge jump for him, but a little more for me.
I choose to stay inside the ship for now. I have no idea how far we flew across the planet.
“Come out,” Brox says. “The Glup are on the way here. They are looking for you. That’s all they want. We have to leave.”
I immediately reverse my decision to stay. Those Glup make my skin crawl like nothing else ever has. “Catch me.”
I sit down on the edge of the doorway. I could easily handle a ten-feet drop here on Mars, where the impact will only be about the same as a four-foot jump on Earth. But to my Earthling brain, the drop looks dangerous.
Brox doesn’t catch me. He just reaches up with his hands, grabs me around my waist, and then lifts me down like he’s taking a doll down from a shelf.
My new boots crunch against the red gravel. “Thank you.”
From outside, the saucer looks in even worse shape than inside. The metallic surface is dented and scraped all over.
I look up at Brox. He’s so insanely big and strong. And he can shapeshift into a monster. I think I should be repulsed by something so alien and weird and dangerous. But I’ve grown up on a steady diet of scifi movies and shifter books, so to me it’s not really all that alien. He’s weird, sure. But not so weird that it repulses me. It’s pretty much the opposite. “What do we do? Will you sell me again?”
“Only if you keep being insolent. Stay here.”
He easily leaps back into the saucer, then returns with a sensationally big sword and a heavy bag. “There’s no cover out here,” he states. “We’ll go towards that mountain. Mountains usually have rocky areas.”
I don’t even have to look where he points. The mountain is the largest in the whole solar system and completely dominates the landscape. We actually haven’t traveled that far from the colony. “Yeah, Olympus Mons. There are rocks, sure. And lots of dust. But not much else.”
“Large rocks are all you need. You can hide there.”
“You not coming?”
“I will escort you there, but I will not be dishonorably hiding.” He strides off towards the huge mountain.
I scramble to follow him. “What about Bleep?”
“She will attempt to repair the ship. When the Glup leave, we will take off again and sell you to someone else.”
We walk in silence for a while. Brox with long, relaxed paces, me on the verge of jogging. The ground is rising slowly, and I realize that we’re already on the flank of the huge volcano that hasn’t had an eruption for two million years. Even this close to it, we can’t see the peak because the curvature of the planet means that it’s beyond the horizon until you’re pretty much standing on it.
“I don’t think you’ll sell me,” I finally say.
“Really.”
“You didn’t sell me to those spiders. And I think they offered you a lot for me. Are they your enemies? I mean, I’m sure they are now. But why did you attack them?”
“The Trophy talks too much,” Brox grunts.
“So am I a trophy or merchandise or something else entirely? I noticed how you protected me inside the ship when it crashed. It was like I was inside a soft, blue cocoon. I can see the bruises you got, you know. You got knocked around pretty bad.”
“Undamaged goods are easier to sell. But if the goods insist on being damaged, there are ways to arrange it.”
There is such menace in his voice that I decide to shut up. For a while, at least. I’d like to know what exactly is going on here. But at least it sounds like those horrible spide
rs are coming for me and not for the colony. Unless they’ve already dealt with that.
“Will the Glup kill the people in the colony?”
There’s no response.
Well, there’s not much I can do about it now. The guys have to handle it on their own. And they do have a way to escape. Not a great escape, but one that works. Sometimes.
I suddenly stop. There’s something about this place…
Brox walks a few more paces, then turns. “We have no time to see the sights. I will carry you if I must.”
“This place,” I say, looking around. “This is familiar. And if it is what I think, then…”
I turn right and walk twenty yards until I see it. “Hey,” I call over to Brox. “I know a place we can hide.”
He makes three immense jumps and is over with me seconds later. “I will not be hiding!”
I point to the ground. “See that square imprint in the gravel? And there and there? I’ve been here before. We landed here in a shuttle. Come with me.”
I walk further, and Brox reluctantly follows. Then I stop.
I bend down and wipe the dust off the cold metal with my hand. “See that? Lift it, and you’ll find something we can probably use.”
Brox suspiciously raps his knuckles on the plate. “Hollow.” Then he grips the edges of the lid and easily lifts it off the opening. There’s a sucking hiss of air.
The hole is round and dark and lined with metal. Rough ladder steps are welded to the sides, leading down into the cool darkness.
“This was the second attempt at a colony on Mars,” I explain. “It failed. But it’s still here. Hard to find if you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for and where it is.”