Lyra’s captor stood beneath the opening, and looked up. Lyra continued to twist and pull against his grip on her wrists. Not to escape. Only to turn to him, to wrap her arms and legs around him, to—
Her stomach dropped as they both surged upward, into the waiting maw of the alien vessel.
Chapter Two
The interior of the alien vessel was not significantly different from any of the hundreds of other vessels Lyra had been on in the decade since she’d earned her pilot’s wings. The layout seemed like that of a standard cargo hauler.
Lyra was imprisoned in the cargo hold with the rest of the female crew members from H8L7R. In addition to the six women from her own crew, there were a dozen others—all human females—who huddled silent and defeated in the hold.
The stale air smelled of unwashed bodies, but it would be some time before Lyra would become aware of anything other than the burning, clawing need for a male body.
She had no idea how much time it took for the intoxicating delirium to lift. She and her fellow crewmates pawed helplessly at the hatch, begging their captors to come to them, take them, slake the maddening need. The other women watched quietly, pity and revulsion in their eyes.
Lyra was one of the first to come down from the arousal. She was a tall woman, standing at six feet, and probably metabolized whatever venom the aliens carried in their saliva faster than the smaller women.
She slid down the ladder and sank to her knees. The fear returned, and it warred with revulsion at the way she’d behaved towards the creatures who’d abducted her. Less than five minutes ago, she’d have happily fucked every single one of them, and thanked them for the privilege.
“Got your sense back?” a nearby voice asked in the Creole.
Lyra turned to look at a petite, brown-skinned woman sitting with her back against the bulkhead, her knees drawn up to her chest. Her pretty, almond-shaped eyes were lined with kohl and a delicate golden ring pierced the center of her full bottom lip. Her ebony hair was fashioned into hundreds of tiny braids, woven through with fine threads of gold and silver.
“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.”