Forced

by Daniella Wright

  Eika let the robe fall. Katie allowed her own inhibitions to fall away with it and openly admired the exquisite beauty of the young woman before her. She saw Eika smile and avert her gaze. Katie opened her legs and, as Eika knelt before her she took her delicate face in her hands and gazed into the oceanic green of her eyes. Then she kissed her, long and deep. She felt Eika tremble. She moved her mouth to her delicate ear and whispered. “I command you, to kiss every inch of me…”

  Then she lay back on the bed and abandoned herself to the pleasure as Eika took her nipples between her delicate, tender lips, and played her small, pink tongue over every inch of her, sensitizing her skin until she could contain herself no longer and, clawing at the bed, she screamed, arching to Eika’s loving, searching mouth. An electric shockwave exploded through her. Wave after wave of pleasure, more intense than she had ever imagined possible, pulsed through her body. She looked up and saw Eika’s perfect face coming down on her breast, taking it in her mouth, as Tsor-Vaal rose over her and penetrated her.

  She cried out, and then she and Tsor-Vaal were one single being, fusing, blending in an exquisite ecstasy that transcended time and space. And she collapsed.

  She was adrift in an ocean of pleasure beyond anything she had ever imagined possible. She looked down and saw Tsor-Vaal’s head rested on her right breast, his eyes closed. On her left was Eika, curled up against her. Her cheek resting on her left nipple. She stroked both their heads, closed her eyes and sank into deep, exquisite sleep.

  Five

  She awoke with a jolt and sat. Eika was gone. She felt a wave of relief. Tsor-Vaal was not there either. She was possessed by a sudden, urgent need to get the hell out of there. She climbed out of the bed and found Tsor-Vaal in the living room. He was staring out of the window at the universe and drinking something that smelt suspiciously like coffee.

  She knew that he knew she was there. She didn’t even try to hide her thoughts. She was sick of bullshit and just wanted to go home and cut all the crap. She said, “I need a shower.” She somehow sensed the movement of his mind, like he was drawing mental breath, and said, “Cut the shit, Tsor-Vaal, just talk to me like a person. I don’t want a fucking sunken bath with nubile wenches from another planet. I want a shower. Then I want to put on my jeans and my sweatshirt and my boots and I want to go home.”

  He turned to face her. He spoke with his voice. It was deep and resonant. He said, “That is not possible, Katie.”

  “Why the hell not?” She was close to tears, but told herself she would be damned to hell before she cried in front of him. She stepped over and jabbed him in the chest with her finger. “Why? Because I belong to you?”

  He frowned. “Did you not have pleasure when we were together?”

  She gaped at him. “Yeah. Yeah, you know what? I did. But just because I’ve been on some freaky sexual bender since I got on this goddamn craft, it does not mean I am just going to roll over and be you fucking sex slave!

  He shook his head. “I do not want a sex slave…”

  She ignored him and went on. “And let me tell you something else, something you don’t understand about my primitive species in general, and me in particular. However much power you may think you hold over me, however much you may think you control me, you will never own me, my mind or my soul. And as long as you keep me a prisoner here on this goddamn ship, you had better stay on your fucking toes, pal. You better have eyes in the back of your fucking head. Because the first chance I get, I will cut your throat and get the hell out of here. Do you understand me.”

  He nodded. “Yes.”

  He watched her a moment with narrowed eyes. He cocked his head on its side and she realized somehow that he was listening to her body.

  She said, “What the hell are you doing?”

  He said, “I am listening to you.” Then he added, “There is a shower cubicle in the bathroom where you bathed with the maidens. I must go to the bridge. We may have a problem. We are being pursued by Naga ships. We will talk afterwards.”

  In that moment his words didn’t register. She felt a strange turmoil of emotions which she did not understand. Anger, disgust, grief, loss and frustration all stormed inside her. She turned and walked back into the bedroom.

  She stood under the powerful jets, bizarrely aware of him as he crossed the room and stepped out through the door into the passage. She sobbed and burst into tears. “How? How can I know this? How can I know that he is sad? How can I know that he is stepping through a door when he is in another room? How?”

  She pounded the walls of the cubicle with her fists, as her tears of frustration and confusion mingled with the water and were washed away.

  Tsor-Vaal strode from his chambers and made his way to the bridge. He found Votan-Vaal sitting in the Captain’s chair watching three Naga battle cruisers through the observation panel.. The bridge crew were assembled at their battle stations. As Tsor-Vaal entered Gunnar-Vaal was saying, “Torpedoes locked and ready, Captain.”

  Votan-Vaal said, “Stand by. We will not engage unless it is necessary.” He glanced at Tsor-Vaal. “Nice of you to join us, Commander. Have you finished playing with your new toy?”

  “What is our status, Captain?”

  “We are held in a cube. We have Naga above, below and on four sides. If we attempt to escape they will vaporize us.”

  “Why haven’t they done so already?”

  The communications officer, said, “Captain Skral, Sir. Shall I put him on the screen?”

  Votan-Vaal raised an eyebrow at Tsor-Vaal. “We are about to find out.” To the communications officer he said, “Yes, on the screen.”

  The obsidian communications screen on the wall flashed and revealed the image of a saurian humanoid with vertical black pupils set in amber, ophidian eyes. Votan-Vaal spoke without rising from his chair.

  “Captain Skral, how can I help you? You have boxed us in. Your actions seem decidedly hostile. Do I need to contact the Office of Galactic Treaty Observance?”

  Captain Skral’s voice was surprisingly sweet, more like the singing of a bird than the hissing of a snake or a lizard.

  “Let us not waste time, Votan-Vaal . Your communications are being jammed. You can communicate with nobody, and even if you could, you know perfectly well that we would have every right under the Piracy Treaty to try you and execute you and your crew on any of our colonial planets.”

  Votan-Vaal turned to Tsor-Vaal and frowned. “What is he talking about?”

  Tsor-Vaal shook his head and spoke up. “What are you talking about, Captain? We know that pirates operate in this sector, and sadly we acknowledge that some of them are Vaalhans. But we ourselves are a peaceful trading ship. We know nothing of piracy…”

  Votan-Vaal continued. “I am sure you have confused us with another ship. Please allow me to offer our help in tracking down these pirates. They are as much a danger to us as to anybody else. In fact, when we detected that you were in the area, we were going to ask for an escort on our way to Proxima B. We could use your protection.”

  Skral was expressionless, even for a Saurian. He said, “It is true what they say about Valhaans.”

  Votan-Vaal smiled agreeably. “What is that, Captain?”

  “That your creator, Osheen, endowed you with mind-speak because you are such incurable liars and hypocrites, it was the only way anyone would ever know if you were telling the truth or lying.”

  “I am wounded, Captain. We seek only to cooperate in the spirit of the Galactic Treaties.”

  Skral cut across them with a shrill whistle, “Enough! I shall waste no more time in futile verbiage with you. We know you boarded our transport ship in the Krishhana Sector, and we know you took the EM plasma cannons. You have half an hour to return them to us. If you do, you may go on your way. If you do not we will board you, take them and vaporize you. The choice is yours.”

  The communications screen went black.

  Votan-Vaal sighed and stood. “It was the only way that particular m
eeting could have ended.”

  Tsor-Vaal crossed to Gunnar-Vaal’s command desk and viewed the positions of the Naga ships. He counted twelve, not so much in a cube around them, as in an orb. He said, “Our only chance is to strike at Skral’s ship.” He turned to face the captain. “We could offer to let them come and inspect our hold for themselves. Either he approaches us or we approach him. When he is too close for the fleet to risk opening fire, we blast him and jump to hyperspace…”

  Votan-Vaal shook his head. “It is too risky. Our chance of success is minimal.”

  Tsor-Vaal shrugged. “We are Valhaans, we do not surrender. We go down fighting…”

  “There is another option, Commander.”

  “What option?”

  Votan-Vaal pressed a button on the arm of his chair. He said, “Bring the human from Commander Tsor-Vaal’s chambers.”

  Tsor-Vaal shook his head. A hot pellet of rage burned in his belly. “No.”

  Votan-Vaal said, “It is six thousand years since the Ael kicked the Naga off the Earth. It is very, very difficult for the Naga to get hold of humans. Have you any idea what the price for a human female is on a Naga world? More than six volumes. Much more.”

  “You cannot. She belongs to me. We have bonded.”

  “Do not tell me I cannot, Commander. I am the captain of this ship, we are buccaneers. The only things I cannot do are the things forbidden by the laws of the cosmos. Everything else is open to me.”

  He laughed. The bridge doors hissed open and Katie was brought in by two guards. She looked bemused. She saw Tsor-Vaal and said, “What the hell’s going on. Is this because of what I said to you…?”

  She saw him shake his head and stopped. Tsor-Vaal stepped over to the Captain. “Captain we have a code. It is the code that has bound all Valhaan buccaneers since the times of Danaan. The Earth woman Katie is my bond. It is forbidden to break that bond. It is a betrayal, not just of your commander, but of the whole crew.”

  Katie looked from one to the other and said, “What?”

  Votan-Vaal roared, “Silence!” He looked around at the members of the bridge one by one. They carefully avoided his eyes. He turned back to Tsor-Vaal. “The survival of my crew and my ship is more important than your bonding, Commander.”

  Tsor-Vaal’s face turned crimson, his neck swelled up and he bellowed at the captain, “She is mine! You cannot trade my woman as though she were Krakkan cattle!”

  Katie’s jaw dropped. “What?”

  Votan-Vaal growled, “Again you are telling me what I cannot do? Do you intend a mutiny?”

  Tsor-Vaal curled his lip and snarled, “Maybe it is time, after all…we should settle this with long swords.”

  The bridge crew glanced at him in unison. His blow came with the speed of a striking cobra. He drove his fist into Votan-Vaal’s belly and sent him crashing across the bridge. The bridge crew were on their feet. He sprang forward to follow up the attack, but Votan-Vaal’s hand flashed and his EM plasma sidearm was pointed at Tsor-Vaal’s chest. He scowled at the crew and said, “Arrest him. Throw him in the cell. I will deal with him later. And get me Skral on the communication screen.”

  Katie watched in horror as Tsor-Vaal was dragged from the bridge. He looked at her and she heard his voice in her mind. “I will come for you. I will save you!”

  Then she turned as the communication screen came to life, and all the blood drained from her face.

  The great saurian head looked at her, the vertical slits of it pupils dilated and the tongue flicked from it’s mouth. The whistling voice said, “Is that a human?”

  Votan-Vaal said, “Indeed it is. Young. Not more than twenty two summers. She has bonded with my Commander…”

  The ophidian eyes swiveled. “Really, Captain? That is a shame…”

  “I know humans are a great delicacy among the Naga - priceless, as I understand it…”

  Katie gave a small cry and Skral’s eyes shifted to look at her. He emitted a gentle, whistling noise like a blackbird on a summer’s evening. His tongue darted from his mouth. Votan-Vaal knew he had him. He said, “You allow us to go freely on our way, no questions asked, and the human is all yours to enjoy.”

  “Done…”

  Votan-Vaal laughed, “Tell me, how will you cook it?”

  “I won’t, Captain. Raw and living is the only way to eat them…”

  Six

  Her wrists were bound behind her back and she was dragged from the bridge, kicking and screaming. In his cell, Tsor-Vaal lived through every moment of her torment with her, until, realizing that her only chance of survival lay in his own escape, he shut her out of his consciousness and concentrated his mind

  She was marched by two Valhaan guards, down winding corridors to the vast, steel loading bay at the rear of the ship. There, they stood waiting. A red light flashed intermittently over the giant airlock and a voice repeated with monotonous regularity that a Naga transit pod was approaching.

  Eventually the flashing light turned from red to green and the disembodied voice announced that the transit pod had docked and the airlock would open in thirty seconds. Her guards glanced at each other, then the one on her left looked into her eyes and placed a thought in her mind. “You have the blood. Be brave, Katie Human. Die well.”

  She stared at him in horror. She said aloud, “Gee, thanks a lot, pal!”

  The great steel doors clanged and echoed and rolled back. A ship that reminded her vaguely of a NASA space shuttle, only ugly in military green, was revealed on a rotating platform. A hatch opened in the side and two humanoids stepped out. Katie went cold, like a million frozen ants were burrowing through her skin. They were the most horrific things she had ever seen. They were snakes on legs.

  They were easily eight foot in height, with large, ophidian heads. Their legs were like bird’s legs, with the knee bent backwards under powerful thighs, and large talons at the end. Their skin was scaly, mainly green, but with occasional brown and red patterns that seemed to change with the light. They wore no clothes, but a belt hung across from shoulder to hip held what seemed to be a sidearm. Their walk was lumbering, but their other movements were fluid and managed to be both graceful and sickening at the same time.

  They crowded in on her, pushing the Valhaan guards aside, leaning down to sniff her and flick their long, tubular tongues over her skin. They grunted and emitted strange, melodious whistling sounds. Then their hands closed on her arms with terrifying strength and they dragged her towards the shuttle. She stared over her shoulder at the Valhaan guards. She screamed to them in her mind to help her. They watched. She could sense their distress. The last thoughts she heard from them were, “Be brave, Katie Human. Die well…”

  She was hurled into the shuttle and strapped to a seat. The airlock closed behind them and the great, steel exterior doors rolled back, gaping out onto the frozen, empty blackness of space. There was a vast roar of engines, a surge of power and they plunged out, into the void.

  The next hours were the darkest and most desperate of her short life. They did not fly to the flagship, but headed out instead, into deep space. She attempted to mind-speak with Tsor-Vaal, but there was no response, nor could she feel him. She had no idea what speeds they were attaining in the small shuttle craft, but she was aware that thousands, probably hundreds of thousands of miles of empty space were passing every hour, taking her further from her home in California, further from the Valhaan ship – and further from Tsor-Vaal.

  She wept bitterly, as she had never wept in her life, but she wept in silence because even as the grief welled in her breast, a fierce, savage rage also burned in her, and she swore to herself that she would sooner burn for an eternity in hell than give these freaks the satisfaction of even glimpsing her grief.

  Her captors did not speak or move. They remained perfectly immobile, and Katie came to wonder if they were in some kind of trance or sleep. She herself dozed fitfully, waking with sudden starts of terror as the insane reality of her situation rushed in o
n her from her dreams.

  She was awoken from one such sleep by the crackle of a radio, and the cooing and whistling of her captors. She opened her eyes and was astonished to see, through the windshield of the shuttle, the vast form of Saturn looming ahead. But they did not head for Saturn, instead they veered and began to close on one of his moons. Dimly, in her memory, she recalled that NASA believed there might be organic life on Enceladus, a frozen moon that held warm water under an icy shell.

  Suddenly they were plunging, hurtling at terrifying speed towards the surface of the frozen moon. Within seconds the windshield was filled with the white, scarred and cracked surface. Katie screamed and covered her face with her arms. There was a strange whoomph! Sound and then total silence. She heard some cooing and trilling and peered over her arms.

  The first thing that struck her was the eerie light. It was a dirty, green luminescence, as though somebody were shining a flashlight through an overgrown pond. They were moving through water. Dense strands of algae drifted past, draped themselves across the craft and were swept away. Small creatures jerked into view, thrashed and twisted and were gone. She stared aghast and wondered where the light could be coming from. The sun was little more than a large star at this distance, and the moon itself was encased in dense ice, so no sunlight could penetrate to this depth.

  And then she saw them: vast beds of algae, with strands three or four miles long, glowing with their own, bioelectric charge. A device, perhaps, to lure life forms, trap them and eat them – part of natures eternal, ruthless cycle of life and death. For around the great forests of seaweed, weaving in and out of the giant tendrils, were massive swarms of what she could only describe to herself as fish, though they were like no fish she had ever seen. They glowed with every color of the rainbow and more besides, and they were of every organic shape imaginable.

  They penetrated deeper into the pea soup of life and soon rock formations became visible, as they neared the ocean bed. A mountain range loomed over to their right and she saw, perched like a bubble on the green and black rocks, a great dome made of some transparent material. And within the dome she could see a small city.