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.
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.