Baby, it's Cold in Space: Eight Science Fiction Romances

by Margo Bond Collins

  “Hello,” she greeted her mystery cellmate, feeling brave. Nothing.

  “Fine, don’t speak to me,” she directly addressed her possible cellmate. “It’s not like I’m out and about socializing and looking to make a new friend. Though, I’m not opposed. I can always use a new friend. Just…I’m pretty sure someone or something in is in here with me, and I’m hoping we can be friends.”

  She paused her movements and listened into the silence and still heard nothing. She snorted in irritation, then resumed her investigation for somewhere to empty her bladder. Maybe this cell was equipped to hold prisoners over time and came with the necessary bathroom facilities. The holding cells on her parent’s rescue ship did.

  As she systematically determined that the mattress she was on was about three meters long and one meter wide, she tried to come up with mundane explanations for the dominating essence of the smell. It was not sharp, but it was intense. It reminded her of the smell her Earthling cat exuded whenever another animal wandered into his territory. A distinctly masculine smell, one emitted for territorial purposes? Despite its intensity, it was not wholly unpleasant. In fact, it seemed almost comforting, sensual, the smell of life inside an otherwise sterile, institutional expanse of black nothingness and artificial surfaces. It seemed to increase her mating heat a disquieting degree.

  Her bladder distended painfully. First and foremost, that organ needed emptying. She reached off what she hoped was the top end of the mattress, considering that was where her head had been lying. Just a couple of steps and she touched wall. She stood, following the surface up with her hands. She stretched as tall as her height allowed on tippy toe and didn’t reach a ceiling. Any sense of claustrophobia dissipated.

  She stepped away from the mattress to the wall, and pressed herself up against the chilling surface, beginning a slow, careful shuffle sideways, working her way left. The wall seemed to curve inward. The room might be circular. Or else her senses were all screwed up. It was amazing how the loss of one’s ability to see affected her ability to picture what was around her. Maybe she’d find a light source on her investigation? The flat surfaces and curved structure would explain the echoing nature of the space. She made it about ten steps before her calf bumped against a cold, smooth bowl-shaped object attached to the wall about knee-high from the floor. Yes! A toilet. She hoped. Her bladder contracted painfully, desperate for relief.

  She crouched down and investigated the object. It sure felt like some kind of toilet. She risked sliding her fingers around the edge and down into the center of the bowl where she found a drainage hole at the bottom. Standing over the bowl, she touched and smelled the faint lingering remains of what had to be someone else’s urine. Thank goodness urine was sterile.

  This first real discovery was somewhat reassuring. Incarceration cells for animals wouldn’t have a toilet designed for humanoids in it. In fact, she felt cheered up, almost giddy.

  “No cleaning service, huh, fellow cellmate? Space prisons, these days. They just aren’t the luxury accommodations of the past.” Her joke fell flat, even to herself. Unlikely to amuse her possible companion.

  She shrugged into the rebounding silence. Maybe her possible cellmate didn’t speak her native language and didn’t have a universal language implant. So the toilet wasn’t especially sanitary. No matter as it was just what she needed at the moment. She couched, poised over the urinal, trying not to touch it with the backs of her legs or bare butt, and peed. Ah. Relief.

  The sound of her peeing hissed loud and unmistakable in the room before tapering off.

  “Just so you know, if someone is in here with me listening right now, I don’t generally pee in front of other people. I find it unbecoming of a lady. Truly. Not that I’m a lady, but my mother does her best to make me into one, so, after a while, a few things eventually stick. The shame of having personal hygiene needs is one of them. I don’t really like hearing other people pee either. It’s so intimate, you know? No, probably not. Chances are you’re a guy and guys have no shame about peeing. You probably turn it into a competition.”

  She thought she heard a faint snort. She strained to hear more.

  Only silence met her nervous chattiness. But the idea that a fellow captive was probably a guy concerned her now. She was naked. Sure, she was innocently imprisoned, but that didn’t mean someone else would be. Innocent, that is. But, if there was a bad person in the chamber with her, he hadn’t done anything yet. Stay positive, Nadiah, she coached herself. Positive, but ready for anything.

  Her final tinkling was really loud in the dark. She hummed a bit. An old Elvis song her mother liked to sing rose up in her mind. She started out soft and low, in a breathy falsetto before her voice deepened and strengthened. She wasn’t as talented with singing as she was at dancing and painting, but she wasn’t tone deaf either.

  “The warden threw a party in the county jail…umhm….prison band was there and they began to wail..umhm…band was jumpin' and the joint began to swing…umhm….You should've heard them jailbirds sing, let's rock, everybody, let's rock…ummhmm…everybody in the whole cell block…was dancin' to the Jailhouse Rock.”

  She paused and listened into the silent cell. Tough crowd. Not much audience appreciation to be found in a venue like this.

  “Thank you, why thank you very much,” she said anyway, dropping her tone to copy her mother’s mimicking of what she’d been told was the original Earth singer’s drawling accent.

  When her bladder was empty she hovered, balanced over the seat. Feeling around behind her along the wall on either side or overhead didn’t produce anything to wipe herself dry. She sighed, hanging over the toilet, waiting to drip dry. When she got out of this mess, she’d never go anywhere again that didn’t have proper toilet. Really. She hadn’t technically chosen to come here, she reminded herself. She smelled her armpit again.

  Yuck. She must have been knocked out here longer than she’d like to think.

  “You’d think, that if a person was cold enough to have persistent titty hard-ons, one’s body odor would fade from the lack of sweat, wouldn’t you?”

  She swore she heard another snorting sound.

  Maybe she should refrain from bringing up potential sexual body parts in her talk?

  Since there was a toilet, might there be a shower or bath in the chamber? The slave ships she’d seen over the years sometimes did have rudimentary but complete facilities—both toilets and showers—in the individual cells. It was rare though. And those slave transport ships hadn’t had lightless cells like this. Nadiah ran her hands up and down her chilled arms and decided she’d never go anywhere without access to a deep, luxurious bathtub again either. Forget clean toilets. For a second, she briefly imagined sliding down through a fantasy of stacked, white bubbles and into steaming, hot clean water. Like in the tub on her their family’s private ship.

  She moaned regretfully. Unless she figured out where she was and successfully escaped, she’d be lucky to even see civilized comforts again. Mostly dry, she stood, determined to gather as much information about her jail as possible. Her parents trained her to keep her head in a crisis. She’d damn well keep her head. Nadiah decided to continue inching a path around the seemingly circular room, with the goal of returning back to her mat. Maybe she’d locate a door, and if she was really lucky, the control panel to hack open. Very few rooms on any ship were completely without an access point on the inside. Though the darkness was a challenge, she might be able to work from memories of helping her dad fix things around their ship in the past to gain her freedom now. And once she broke her way out, then what? Maybe she could tear the cover off her mat and create some kind of body cover-up? She hated the idea of still being naked when she escaped. And if Dad and Uncle Kugen rescued her while she was naked—her father wouldn’t let her out of his sight again until she was a hundred years old.

  Just a step past the toilet, she discovered a low sink-like object mounted into the wall. She fumbled around and pushed a flexib
le flat mechanism sticking out over it and a trickle of lukewarm water emerges. Not much, but it was something. She splashed her face and rinsed her underarms. She sniffed. Not much better, but a slight improvement. She punched the mechanism, so the water trickled off, and continued to move sideways. If she was on a spaceship, clean water would be a precious commodity. When she is ready to escape, she’d consider using that fact in some way, maybe just by leaving the water flowing. While she debated the potential escape opportunities the water might provide, she stubbed her toe into an object projecting 90 degrees from the wall, and discovered what felt remarkably like a small cleansing unit.

  “Hot damn!”

  Could this be something that detached from the wall and provided an escape route through the interior pathways of the ship?

  She eagerly stepped in, over the ledge, feeling for the controls. Even if she didn’t find a door, this might be her way out of the cell. The unit was totally utilitarian, with no side panels, but if it worked, it meant it was connected to something outside the cell, and she could try to dismantle it and escape her captivity.

  She closed her eyes to protect them from the unit’s chemicals and pushed the activate button she found on the wall at shoulder height. Nothing happened.

  “Shit. No,” she moaned sadly. She pounded a little harder on the button and suddenly the cleansing chemicals doused her from above. She closed her eyes just in time. The liquid bubbled up on contact with her skin and hair, fizzed away and then began to dissipate. She almost jumped when a loud overhead blower activated with a sharp rattling sound and pounded her with hot air. That felt amazing. She started to lift her long hair to finger dry it under the force of the blowing air.

  The blowers sputtered out and goose bumps reasserted themselves on her arms as the chill in the room reinvaded her body.

  “Blast!”

  She let her hair fall back to her shoulders, still damp. That felt amazingly good. Maybe she could just run the unit a few more times before she tore it apart.

  “Of course, the activity in this room is probably being monitored and now the captors will know that I’m conscious and moving. So much for stealth, right?” She chided herself and asked her possible companion’s opinion, starting up her one-sided conversation again. “Still, being clean feels good.”

  Since nothing had hurt her yet in her search so far, she exited the shower, shuffling slightly faster and with more urgency as she worked her way around the room, which she determined was definitely a jail cell. It was larger than she’d have guessed. The floor seemed to dip slightly down towards the center of the chamber away from the wall.

  “Ouch!” she groused.

  She’d scraped her hip against an unexpected steel shelf protruding out from about three feet up the wall. She investigated, running the tips of her fingers over the surface. There was some kind of panel above it in the wall, about the size of her torso, but no mechanism to open it. It might be worth attempting to open. She might, just might, be able to squeeze through. She continued her slow shuffle around the cell. She’d prefer to find a door before she attempted to access the small panel over the shelf or the shower unit, since she had no tools. Having safely navigated the cell so far, though, and in her eagerness, she dropped her caution and shuffled faster, mapping of the exterior walls. She was only about halfway around the space.

  Her foot stubbed up against what seemed to be a sleeping mat like the one she’d woken up on, making her pause. It didn’t slide across the floor as one would expect of a cheap, transport mat, and that lack of movement seemed unlikely if the mat was unoccupied; her mat couldn’t have weighed more than half a kilogram. She gave the mat a tentative kick with her toe and it dipped in slightly, then bounced back to follow her foot’s path as she pulled away. It didn’t shift across the floor.

  “Hello?”

  She couldn’t have circled the whole room yet. It definitely wasn’t her mat. In addition to some weight holding it down, her mat hadn’t been up against the wall like this one was.

  “Someone there?” Silence.

  She crouched and crawled onto the edge of the mat on her hands and knees, cautiously reached out and froze when her left hand landed on top of a warm, very large, very muscular, and also very naked, hairy bit of someone’s body. She tumbled forward slightly, and in her attempt to halt her forward motion, her other hand cupped a very large, very hard—if she was not mistaken—penis-shaped thing. A wave of intense heat surged through her body and made the flesh between her legs go slick with her body’s fluids. How embarrassing.

  “Oh shit! So sorry about that!”

  She jerked her hand away and tried to scramble back but the individual was fast and she found her right wrist locked in the grasp of a massive hand that appeared to be more than twice the size of hers. Whoever or whatever had her was as large as any of the oversized males in her family, including her dad and uncle, so about twice her size. And the creature was male. That evidence had been confirmed under her searching hand. Not that she’d ever held a real penis, but her cousin Margarete had given her a gag present on her eighteenth birthday that she subsequently kept buried in her closet back home. She’d taken it out on occasion. Like when she’d considered playing with it alone, late in the night. But it had just been so big, she’d suspected that it wasn’t realistic. She’d never actually used it for its intended purpose because, obviously, it wouldn’t…fit there. And neither would that appendage she’d just grabbed by accident. Hopefully, the guy wouldn’t be interested in a wee little half-Earthling thing like her. Did her mother—? No, not thinking about her mother having sex with her oversized father. Ugh.

  “Let me go!” She flailed against him. Uselessly. Mostly, her struggling just reinforced the fact that they were both naked by ensuring lots of skin on skin contact.

  Her cellmate hauled her up against his chest like she was nothing more than a thin blanket. She sprawled awkwardly across his lap, gasping and fighting to get away. Apparently her squirming was effective only in rousing the creature’s lust and part of her mind registered that the already hard cock under her hip seemed to be getting even larger. She fought harder, reaching up to scratch at his face, discovered a thick beard, tangled her fingers in it and yanked, and then used her other hand to punch at his manhood, an attempt deflected by his arm like she was nothing more than an annoying gnat. The guy easily secured her other wrist and, squeezing her small fist, forced her to let go of his beard. Then, in one move, he twisted her completely around, locking her up against his body, her back to his chest, her derriere snugly cradling the evidence of his now huge appendage.

  “Ssshhh…” he hushed into her ear. There was something off about the thick sound. A deep accent? More air than voice?

  She continued to use her legs to kick and twist out of his grasp, but he simply spread his large thighs and hooked his lower legs over hers, trapping them against the mat beneath them. She was effectively, completely held immobile against his body. He moved his head to the side the instant hers slammed back. All she did was give herself a mild whiplash against his shoulder. All the defense training in her life wasn’t going to match his size, speed and strength, nor his hold on her in at the moment.

  “Sshhh…” he hissed into her ear, sounding more annoyed than soothing this time. She stilled and he hummed something that sounded like his approval.

  “Who are you?” She demanded, stiff and straining again to get away.

  He didn’t answer her. Instead he pulled her tighter against his chest and, nuzzling through her long, tangled wet hair and pressing his face against her exposed neck, inhaled deeply. He was smelling her? The guy was flipping sniffing her. And by the intensity of the smell she got off him, he was the source of the strangely appealing musky smell she’d noticed earlier. The one that might be related to the tiny explosive sensations erupting across her skin where they touched. She could smell the chemical cleanser on him so he’d been in here long enough to use the facilities too. His short beard was sur
prisingly soft and it felt like a caress tickling against the sensitive skin on her neck.

  He hummed again, louder this time, with a certain possessiveness. A tension-producing mix of anxiety and her desire blossomed into such a physical need that she found herself rubbing her backside against his groin in an erotic invitation far beyond the scope of her experience and knowledge. The connection between her brain and her body lit up like a supernova, blown apart, her brain imploding, her body exploding, or rather, wanting to explode. This was not good.

  He leaned back against the wall though, pulling her with him, and just held her tight in his arms.

  She squirmed, which seemed to just make his aroused manhood snug itself up tighter between her butt cheeks. Oops. Her heart was racing. So was his. It practically vibrated, thudding against her bare back. She stopped squirming.

  She steadied her breathing to calm herself down. He wasn’t attacking her, even though she could imagine he might be contemplating it.

  The rhythm of each of his deep breaths helped calm her own breathing. After a few minutes, he seemed to settle, his arms relaxing their hold on her slightly, though that rigid male appendage trapped under her tush didn’t diminish or go away. If anything, it had grown harder.

  “Who are you? Where are we?” She asked, softly, not wanting to rouse any negative reactions. Not that she was sure what she’d classify as negative from her perspective.

  No answer. He pressed his face against her neck again. She could feel him shaking his head back and forth against her, his bristly chin lightly scraping the tender skin above her shoulder. But he did nothing more aggressive than hold her.