No, Jurong tore them from me. I try to explain, but only manage to emit a soft moan.
The touch becomes intimate, as he reaches my fulcrum. I blink.
The Dystyr are relatively conservative and like most of our females I’d been saving myself, intending to be one of the women yielding myself to a worthy alpha. But fate had other intentions for me. The first man whose penis touched me was Jurong. And the first man who intimately gropes my sex organ is some Slaver lowlife, a human male whom I’d only set eyes on moments before. All my deeply held romantic dreams are torn to nothing in a matter of minutes.
His hand releases my core then, but only to squeeze my breasts, much as Jurong recently did. Although is interest has moved to groping my chest, he leaves my dress hitched up, and the presence of open air on my naked, exposed rump is unbearably humiliating.
“Nice!” my assailant voices approval of the flesh he’s squeezing.
“No!” I’m finally able to vocalize a plea, and gradually, I draw up my arm to try and push him away. A stun blast doesn’t disable the victim for long, and I find I can now move a little, but still too slowly to offer any practical defense.
Abruptly there’s a burst of sound from one of the men’s communicators. The hands leave me, but after they’re gone, I can still feel where I was touched.
“We’d better get back,” says one man.
I’m too late to defend my breasts, but with my muscle control improving by the second, I reach tentatively behind me, and start pushing my dress back over my rear.
“Put one of the shock collars on her,” the other guy speaks. “We don’t want a prize of this grade running away.”
I don’t know what a shock collar is, but avoiding it sounds more important than protecting my dignity. I look up fearfully, switching my efforts to raising my torso up from the floor. But I’m not yet fast enough.
The unshaven one is already leaning over me, holding a piece of alloy tech in his hand. It looks like a band, a circle of similar circumference to a woman’s throat. The device in his fingers hangs opened by the hinge, but at the free end I see the teeth of a locking mechanism.
I moan, trying to fight the thing away with my half-numb arm. This cannot be allowed. Whatever a shock collar is, I do not permit them putting one on me.
“What do you figure her fleshy things are?” unshaven-one says to his friend, brushing my scorns away to fully expose my neck, unaware that to a Dystyr, he’s doing something that’s a great intimacy. “Ah, no matter. Welcome to Aghara-Penthay, cunt.”
And the collar snaps into place around my unprotected throat. The alloy feels cool compared to my skin.
I’ve made it into a half-sitting position by this time. I tug at the band around my throat, aiming to pull it back off, but it’s locked itself, and I don’t have a key.
“Now, cunt, if you don’t come along, docile-like, this is what will happen.” And before he gives me a chance to cooperate there’s an intense jolt of pain from my neck. It makes the muscles in my body go rigid and I’m right back on the floor again, my spine arched with suffering. Abruptly as the pain came, it then goes, but I can still feel a tingling after-memory in my muscles.
Horrified, I look up at him from the floor. I see clearly how he delivered the pain – there’s a small controller device in his palm – nothing more than a pushbutton and a dial. I reach out a shaking hand. If I’m going to escape I need to overpower him and seize that thing.
“Oh no, sweet-tits,” he laughs as he sees the direction of my gaze. “Do you think you’re the first cunt to try and do that?”
The next blast of pain he inflicts lasts longer. I cry out, clawing at my neck a second time to try to pull the source of the hot agony away, but my arms lock and I’m paralyzed with the pain.
When the torture stops, any possibility of resistance goes with it. Violence is almost unheard of among the Dystyr, except for rival males fighting for alpha status. I’ve never experienced someone trying to cause me pain purely for its own sake before.
“Do you need another demonstration?” he asks, holding up the control.
“No!” I say fearfully, and I mean it. I’d rather endure him squeezing my breasts again than have another dose of the collar.
“Then on your feet, slit,” he says. “And come with us.”
I struggle to stand, but I’ve been left very wobbly after my ordeals, and I can only stay upright by supporting myself with a hand against the wall. With my free hand I surreptitiously reach for my throat. The collar feels hard – just a piece of alloy tech. I pull helplessly at it. There’s no sign of the suffering it can inflict. There’s also no sign of a release mechanism.
“It doesn’t come off,” the other man, who is watching me, says. “So unless you want another dose, you’d better forward march, sweet-tits.”
Shakily I begin to walk. The Slavers fall into formation around me, one going ahead, and one behind. I realize don’t know which of these two was the man who just claimed the honor of touching me more intimately than anyone before.
We reach a junction with the main corridor, and the evidence of Slaver brutality continues. The corpse of an old man is sprawled where the floor meets the wall. Then there’s another, and another. In some places, streaks of blood smear a path along the wall.
“You didn’t have to kill them all,” I feel compelled to protest.
“I didn’t kill them all,” laughs one of the men, unashamed at the carnage.
And then we see the first one I recognize – poor, unattractive Nee-Sin from our course. With minimal prospect of a boyfriend, she consoled herself with food and became morbidly obese.
“Oh, I did kill that one,” says the man at the front. “Ugly cunt.”
I feel hate like I’ve never felt hate for a sentient being ever before. Injustice always makes me furious. I clench my fists, vowing to find a way to avenge her.
“Look, you’re making the slit angry,” says the one behind me, amused.
Seething impotently, I proceed, trapped between my captors. The Slaver at the front leads us down to the lower level – the one with the docking bays. I see more and more dead. Always they are the old and the unattractive. I don’t know whether to envy them or pity them. Not when I’ve already had a taste of what’s in store. That Slaver groped me. Such a sexual assault could earn him a jail spell in the Republic. This ship is supposed to be Republic territory. But one of these men groped me anyway. He touched my very core. Legally I’m still free on a Republic vessel, so I should be allowed to run from him, as I please, to report him, but I’m afraid of the collar and I mutely follow the pirate in front. The pain from that thing around my neck was so terrible, what else can I do?
We reach one of the docking ports, and at the airlock, the friendly pastel decoration that was all over the transport switches to a cold alloy. Other Slavers are converging on this place, herding their own captives towards the airlock. I see only one male captive, and the rest comprise a growing group of women. Most of the prisoners have a collar like mine around their necks, and collars are not the only indignities the raiders have inflicted. One woman I see is already nearly naked above the waist. She clutches the meagre shredded remains of her top, vainly trying to hide her chest.
I hesitate before crossing the threshold into the Slaver ship. This is far more than a physical boundary. I know that once I’m there, I’m beyond salvation. But I’m prodded with a blaster in the back, and I’ve stumble on to the territory of Aghara-Penthay before I know it.
So that’s it. My feet are on a Slaver ship’s floor. I’ve just lost all my rights as a free citizen. Just by taking one step, because I don’t have a penis between my legs, I’ve become a slave. The unfairness of such a rule eats me inside. But my captors bark an order, and still I must move blindly on, following the others in a corridor that’s now getting crowded, much like when we made for the recreation hall.
Also similarly to that previous short journey, the corridor opens into a huge space. There’s no sign of any comfort in this new chamber – this is nothing like the transport. It is merely a ship’s hold. This is a space to transport goods. Living goods. A large crowd of prisoners are already gathered in the center of the space. I break ahead of my captors and hurry forwards towards them, eager to be separated from the two men who attacked me. In this big group, for now we’re largely unsupervised. The Slaver guards merely position themselves around the walls, leaving their captives alone in the middle. The pirate men are relaxed. They have the confidence of soldiers who have already won the victory.
Among the others, I’m thankful to be just one of a crowd. But the crowd are almost all women, and a disproportionate number of us are beautiful. We huddle together, feeling safer together even though that safety is an illusion. Everyone seems to be talking, trying to find a solution when there is none. Many, but not all the prisoners, are locked in shock collars similar to mine.
“Coora!” a frantic voice calls, and I see Trindii. Her eyes are tear-streaked and I see she’s also been collared, but she seems otherwise unharmed. We hug each other, and I burst into a fit of sobs, crying which I’m unable to control for several minutes.
“Where did you go?” she asks when I’m calm, looking into my face with concern. “What did the Slavers do to you?”
They did so much. The collar, and my dress baring my ass while he touched between my legs, and his hand on my breasts. And Jurong. I look away, too ashamed to answer.
“Me too,” she says, understanding, “but I’m alive.”
“Better we’d been killed,” I say to her gloomily.
A claxon sounds from somewhere, different in pitch to the alarm calls on the transport, and I feel a vibration through the floor. I know what that means. We’ve just undocked. We’re even more truly doomed now. There will be the familiar kick in a moment when we go into hyperspace, and then we’ll be beyond rescue. Please no… But there it goes. The tug, against my whole being, of the star jump. An instant has passed, and already we’re light years from the Moons of Odaron.
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