Closer and closer, and then my turn comes. The two men stand in front of me. They are clothed. Males. Free. I am nude, my hands across my body.
“You understand me, alien?” the taller one barks.
I debate feigning that I don’t speak Republic Common, but my face has already given me away.
“Good. Legs apart! Hands on your head.”
I shake my head in horror – no, no, they can’t expect me to show myself. Human women, yes, but Dystyr? Without hesitation the shorter, squat man raises something towards me, a device like a baton he’s holding in his hand, and touches it to my upper arm where I’m hiding myself. It’s like a red hot iron has been pressed against me and I scream. People nearby look around.
He moves the baton away, and the pain fades almost immediately. My muscles around the area of contact are shaking, and I can’t stop them.
“Do I need tell you again?” he asks. He’s smiling. This is entertaining for him.
“No, I’ll obey!” I cry. Tears are coming now, and I can control them no more than the trembling. Abandoning my scant protection, I put my hands on my head, and open my thighs.
And they inspect me, their eyes moving over my body blatantly and intimately.
It’s bad enough being naked in front of all these people, but standing in this demeaning pose makes the ordeal into my worst nightmare. My breasts are lifted by the position of my arms, and presented even more completely. The private place between my legs feels open and exposed.
The men make noises of approval.
“A very fine cunt,” says the taller man. “Nine for the face, losing one just because she’s an alien. Shame. Ten for everything else?”
“Agreed.”
“Now, keep still while I do this,” tall one says to me, and with a different device he leans down and writes something on my naked left thigh. A number, in large print visible across the room, drawn with a thick red line.
It says “forty-nine”.
Then they move on to the woman behind me in the ranked captives. I hesitate, holding my pose for a moment because I’m fearful of another touch from that baton. I glance across and see that some of the nude men are watching me continue to hold position, and this triggers embarrassment to overcome fear. I risk dropping my arms, and resume concealment of my body.
Two men have been progressing down each of the lines. The pair dealing with Trindii’s line have only just reached her. I look across, trying to project my sympathy and support for her, as she places her hands on her head and parts her legs to put everything on show, as I just did.
“Nice face,” one says. “An eight. We can all see what her best assets are. Ten for those bangers. Short legs – a six. Seven for the body. Seven for the ass.”
“Not everyone likes their breasts that big,” his companion counters.
“But ten to the right customer.”
“True. Okay, ten for the boobs it is, then. What does that make?”
Trindii has ‘thirty-eight’ written on her.
I didn’t quite comprehend it when it was my turn, but is that what’s going on? We’re being scored? Given a score for our faces, legs, breasts, body, and backsides, as though nothing more than genes and flesh matters about us? I’m so revolted that anyone could be cruel enough to subject another human being to this objectification that in my outrage I forget to guard my feelings. And one of the men in Trindii’s line sees me scowling.
“What’s with you, hooters?” he snarls across at me. “You can wipe that look of your face right now!”
I snap my gaze back to the front, but it’s too late. Fresh terror grips me. It feels like my heart will burst out of my chest. It’s hard not to scream.
“I’m coming back to make you regret that, sweet cheeks,” the taller man, who looks as though he’s not washed for days, warns me, and I have to fight not to pass out from sheer fear.
There are so many of us here that it takes quite some time for the men to label each female with her score. But it’s done in the end. Then, more orders are shouted at us, and a reorganization takes place. Women with scores over forty-six are grouped together. Next goes forty-one to forty-five. Thirty-six to forty. And so on, down through ranks imposed by those demeaning beauty scores. The Slavers seem to have decided against capturing women with low scores – females too old or ugly to be a sex slave. I’ve seen enough to know what happened to those ones – slaughtered on the transport. Arghh! These men are such animals. No, worse than that. Animals can show affection, or be loving. There’s no trace of that from the Slavers.
We, their latest victims, form into fresh circles.
The largest of our naked hordes are in the thirties scoring band, Trindii among them. Now I only glimpse her through the milling crowd of flesh. My group – the top scoring section, number thirty-four females – more than in the group below us. We huddle together, nude and frightened. Each one of my new companions is indeed a beauty. While I endorse their sexist ranking system in no way, I can see why males would find these women desirable.
One girl, a redheaded human beauty, bursts into tears, and without warning, she throws herself at me. I flinch, for an instant, fearing attack, but all she does is cling to me, weeping constantly. With both of us nude, our breasts are brushing together and I blush, unused to being in such intimate contact with another naked female.
Meanwhile, the Slavers proceed to the next phase with practiced calm. The events which signify the end of my life are no more than routine to them. I extricate myself from the redhead as they begin to move us out of the large hold space. The bare males go first, then the lowest scoring females are ordered to stand up and follow their guards, shamefully concealing their nakedness as they pad docilely away, then the next group, and so on. I see the poor first officer from the transport, Oshia Trondo, in nakedness she jarringly contrasts to the dignified woman in uniform.
Some of the women are being encouraged to faster movement, by means of a goad touched to a nude buttock. But I don’t notice any of the women who are tortured are particularly slow – deserving the punishment. I think the guards are just frightening them for entertainment, or because it pleases them to see the way an unlucky victim skips and jumps with the pain.
Whichever is the truth, on and on it goes. The sequencing means that my group, what a repellant sexist might call the premium captives, are last to be ordered to our bare feet.
“Move, beauties,” we’re ordered, so we do, hurrying towards the exit from the hold. I’m trying to strategically position myself in the center of the herd, where I’m least likely to be attacked, but others have formed the same idea, so there’s a fair bit of jostling and elbows between us all as we vie for position.
We hurry until we’re out the hold and we’re being driven along a corridor, featureless except for directions in the alien language of Aghara-Penthay. Then the fear of what’s ahead begins to override the fear of what’s behind, for from somewhere in front, we can hear the sound of women screaming.
But we only slow for long enough for the females at the back to pay for the delay with their asses. Then some of us join the screaming – our cries terrifying in the small corridor. Naked women panic, and some try to run. I’m pushed hard from behind by someone trying to move up the group, and I fall heavily to the alloy floor. Suddenly I’m the one who is at the rear, and it’s my turn to feel the wand. I scramble to my feet, weeping with terror, but the guards are already on me, and my howls add to the noise of my companions. I’ve never screamed so much in one day in all of my life.
3 – Cells
Beyond the next junction, we discover the source of the rumpus.
A large holding cell with bars for walls has all the male captives inside. There are exposed cocks everywhere I look, but it’s not men’s bodies that’s the most terrible aspect. Some of the females taken from our ship have been put in the cell with the men, and the men are raping them.
“No!” I gasp, my horror very personal, for one of the unlucky ones in the cage is Trindii.
Five of the males are on her. So outnumbered is she, that between them they have easily lifted her from the ground. One man holds each leg, one her torso, and one each arm. Trindii is gripped in midair, rotated to a position as though lying on her side. The appetite of these beasts is urgent enough that a man holding one leg is managing to rape her even while she’s suspended.
“What are they doing?” I cry out in horror to the woman next to me. “That’s Trindii!”
“What do you think they’re doing?” my brunette neighbor hisses. “And don’t speak so loudly. Do you want them to do it to you?”
“But those men are Republican captives, like us,” I protest in a softer voice. “They should be better than that.”
I feel compelled to help Trindii somehow, but the guards are herding us onwards. We hurry on down the corridor, a river of naked female flesh, and the sounds of the orgy fade behind us.
“They’re lost, we’re all lost,” the brunette says once it’s safe. “No reason for those men to hold back. No reason to obey the law. And there’s a lesson to you and to us all about our new lives. Even being a male slave is better than being a woman.”
The Gods have mercy on us.
At successive junctions we turn left and right, and then we reach our destination. This new place could be mistaken for a pet store or zoo – a narrow room lined with rows and stacks of large cages, forming a grid. But it is a store for sentient women. Our captors are already forcing the females at the front of our group into the tiny boxes – one for each woman. On our knees, with the head down low so we’re almost tucked into a fetal ball, it looks as though there’s just enough room to squeeze inside. To a free woman it might appear like confinement would be another horror, but we’ve already learnt we’d rather be locked in there than out in the corridor with the men, or back in the cell with Trindii and the males. So no-one offers resistance, and when a guard opens a cage for me – one of the higher ones where I must make an undignified scramble up to get onto the shelf, I climb inside quickly and press my head to my knees, so I can tuck my body inside.
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