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Introduction:

Coora of the Dystyr didn’t want to be a sex slave, but it’s the fate of her and many others on board the transport Moons of Odaron to be captured and taken to the raiders’ planet of Aghara-Penthay. This novella length story set in the Aghara-Penthay universe shows the experiences of a regular slave girl being captured, processed and sold.

The Short Sexual History of Coora – A Slave.

Olga’s note:

Stephenie Meyer, author of the Twilight novels, wrote a short story retold from the viewpoint of a minor character, someone who walks into the scene of one of her novels and is almost immediately killed.

In my stories, at least the ones so far, the first-person viewpoints of characters in my Aghara-Penthay shave all been women on special missions, or women captured to order, which means they’ve been missing out on the experience of a more regular slave – someone unlucky caught as part of a raid, an insignificant victim among many other women, someone processed, and sold.

In my story ‘Queen of the Sex Slaves’, during the faction leader’s council meeting, Ajeedie briefly witnesses an alien female being raped and then strangled by Monad. We never learnt her name, but she had one, and she had a life. Her name was Coora, and this is her story.

1 - Alarm

I’m not sure if the unexpected deep booming noise wakes me even before the sudden alarm call of the ship’s klaxon begins. But somehow I instantly pass from being asleep to being alert, my heart immediately racing with the adrenaline compulsion to flight. Trindii, in the other bunk, has woken just as suddenly as I have, and she is already sitting up rubbing her eyes. We hear another boom. It is a deep sound, a noise like thunder that reverberates right through the hull, and then we hear a distance crackling. Our beds shake as though there’s an earthquake. There are more signs that something is amiss. I realize the ship’s engines are straining with effort, instead of making their usual relaxed shush.

“Coora,” says Trindii, “What was that noise?”

“That second one sounded almost like a blaster cannon,” I reply, puzzled, and seeing her eyes widen with panic, I try to project a calmness I don’t feel. “But I’m sure I’m wrong.” And yet, I wonder, if I’m wrong why is the emergency claxon is still sounding, it’s rise and fall repeating over and over?

“Coora!” Trindii squeaks, when there’s another bass thumping sound. She has one of the highest soprano voices I’ve ever known, and when she’s anxious, it pushes her pitch up to even higher registers. Trindii has been my best friend since the first days of us studying together, and I love her like a sister, but I have to admit she’s hopeless in a crisis.

“Get dressed, now,” I order, and I swing my long legs out my bunk. The floor is cold on my bare feet.

But Trindii continues to sit there, with her bed sheet clutched to her chest, as though that will help if there is a raid.

“What are we supposed to do after that?” she wails.

I fight down my frustration at her. I have no better idea than she does, but just dithering will make me get scared too. Like most travelers I paid scant attention to the safety briefing when we boarded this transport. How should I know where to assemble? But there are over two thousand souls on this ship. Judging by the additional noise I’m tuning into, most of those are streaming by our door, so the solution is easy.

“Let’s get dressed,” I say, trying to adopt a tone of firm reassurance. “We’ll follow the crowd.”

Trindii looks hesitant, but finally, thank the Gods, she begins to move.

The floor is cold, but our cabin, one of the cheaper ones close to the engine deck, is hot from its proximity to the gravity drives, so we both slept only in underwear.

Trindii, a human, has the body shape that would be described as voluptuous. She’s no doubt destined to turn to fat in later life, but for now, her pleasingly rounded figure is at its nubile best - big appealing eyes, and some of the largest breasts I’ve seen on a young woman. She’s at the peak of her life’s appeal to men. Her skin is tight with youth, a deep brown color, and it’s free from the least blemish.

In our cramped cabin a large proportion of one wall is filled with the mirror, and in it, I cannot avoid glancing at my own image, and considering the implications of what I see.

The reflection shows someone much like a human female in her figure, only my skin has a blue-green iridescent shimmer. My eyes are completely black - our species never evolved irises and sclera. And the most dramatic difference between myself and someone like Trindii, is that instead of possessing hair like a human or many other humanoid species, protruding from my scalp are thick tubes of flesh, a bit like giant dreadlocks coated in my same shimmering skin.

They’re known as ‘scorns’ in the language of my world. Women of my species cover their scorns on our homeworld, for they are as clear a sexual characteristic as breasts. Males do not develop them. Young girls have small stubs, and then as we mature their scorns grow rapidly, reaching their longest – down to our thighs – in our early twenties at the peak of our fertility. As a woman progresses through her adulthood they gradually shorten, but still remain for life - only withdrawing back to shoulder-length in the oldest women in society.

I reach for my dress, a garment which hugs my figure flatteringly, but still covers me from neck to ankle. As most of the galaxy is unaware of the significance of scorns, I quickly abandoned the head covering once I was offworld. I felt prudish compared to the human females merrily flaunting their heads, and even after a couple of years out in the universe, it still gives me a private thrill to behave so scandalously, when no-one around me knows I’m walking round in a state that’s our culture’s equivalent of half-naked.

Another concussion reverberates through the ship – the worst yet. For an instant the artificial gravity fails, silence falls, and the lights flicker as I’m weightless. Then normality is restored, including the unending call of the claxon.

The glitch ramps Trindii’s anxiety up further.

“This flight should be safe, Coora,” she says. “Who could attack something this size? And we’re deep in Republic space.”

Neither of us want to acknowledge the answer.

I can hear a man’s voice getting louder as he moves nearer along the corridor, ordering passengers like a drill sergeant. He pounds on each door he passes.

“Everyone out their cabins! All passengers must assemble in the entertainment hall. Captains orders. Everyone out! All passengers assemble in the entertainment hall.” The volume reaches is peak as he passes us, and gradually fades as he moves away.

I fasten my dress around me while Trindii forces her short legs into tight black shorts. My garment opens at my left side, the fabric just wide enough to wrap around me, and once it’s in place, it is meant to be secured with a series of buckles. I start with the buckles under my arm, and work downwards. It’s tight about my bust – I too have a full chest for a young woman, although I’ll never compete with Trindii’s twin balloons.

“Maybe we’re in an uncharted asteroid field?” I say while I secure the fastenings over the feminine flare of my hip. There’s another concussion. Again, the lights flicker, and the gravity fails for a moment. Neither of us believe my optimistic words. If we were being damaged by asteroids we’d slow down, and they’d muster us as the lifepods. But the entertainment hall is in the center of the ship, and the engines are firing fit to burst. No. We’re trying to outrun something.

Trindii pulls a tight shirt over her head, the cut high enough that it bares the skin of her belly. Not just her belly - it barely fits around her chest. She doesn’t mind flaunting what she’s got, that girl. My people, the Dystyr, are rather more conservative. Show our figures, yes. Skin, no. However, although I’ve fastened my dress as far as mid-thigh, I leave the remaining buckles flashing my shins, to allow better freedom of movement. I pull on some soft ankle boots, ones with only a low heel. Footwear designed for comfort rather than beauty.

“Ready, Trindii?” I ask when she’s pulled on some pumps, and with a nod from her we activate the door and emerge into the corridor.

Outside it’s crowded with people, all of them headed in the same direction, and we can only progress at the speed of the slowest. A diverse cross section of the galaxy is represented, spread by age, sex, and species. I see two aliens who must come from a methane world, and need respirators.

Trindii takes my hand in hers so we don’t lose each other. Her flesh feels warm.

It’s loud in here – everyone is talking nervously.

“Is it pirates?” an old woman in front says to her companion in a scratching voice. “Gods, don’t let it be pirates from Aghara-Penthay.”

“I survived a pirate raid near Coboron 6, once,” a man says. “You never forget that sound. I tell you – those are raider blaster cannons.”

Another jolt comes without warning, and the ship shakes like we’re in an earthquake. I’m thrown against the side of the corridor, hurting my shoulder. I hear the engines stutter for a moment.

The crowd moves a little faster.

Once we reach the entertainment hall, there’s enough room for us all to spread out and pick up our pace. Rows of seats face a stage. It’s configured for a much bigger crowd than the current ship’s compliment. I’m expecting to see crew on the stage already prepared to explain what’s going on, but there’s no-one here yet.

I recognize a few members of our class and we move towards them. There are nearly two hundred of us on this trip – final year university students of galactic politics, all of us being taken to Republic Prime to see the senate in action. With the exception of a few mature students, most of us are in our early twenties, by the standard galactic reckoning. Studying at Capital University on Iniver Four is, for most of us, our first time living away from our homeworlds.

“Coora,” a male voice calls my name. I know who it is before I turn around.

Jurong. I made the mistake in my freshman year of being warm to him. As an alien arriving at a largely human institution, I wasn’t sure I’d fit in, and I was anxious to make friends. I needed someone to talk to. But he hoped my interest in him was of a different kind, and by the time I told him that was never going to happen, the damage had been done.

He’s smart enough to keep just on the right side of becoming a full-blown stalker, so I can’t make a complaint to anyone without it sounding hysterical: “What’s wrong with someone helping you out?” – that kind of thing. But he’s worked his way relentlessly into membership of my circle of friends, and since then, it’s been pretty hard to go anywhere without Jurong showing up.

“Jurong - what do you think is going on?” Trindii asks him, as a machine gun rattle of smaller thuds vibrate the ship. We have space to spread out, but she’s standing so near me her shoulder presses on my upper arm. One of the reasons I like Trindii so much is she’s always been an understanding ally on the Jurong situation. We go to a club, he’s there, and even if she’s tired or wants to go with a guy, she’ll never abandon me to him.

“Everything points to a pirate attack,” he says gravely, “Even though we’re in Republic territory.” He’s answering her, but his eyes are only on me. “Don’t be afraid Coora - I’ll protect you,” he adds, but when he says it he’s looking me up and down with that longing, hungry look that reminds me that pirates aren’t the universe’s only predators.

I wish I was better at handling this kind of male attention. I don’t want to sound immodest, but for as long as I can remember I’ve been considered exceptionally attractive. On my homeworld, I even helped pay for my college fees with some modelling work – an activity which I found very boring, but lucrative. Once I left home and mixed with the humans, I soon found they thought me equally beautiful, but with no one suitable for reciprocating, I’ve remained inexperienced, and a virgin.

I’m tall for a female, and my face is almost perfectly symmetrical, with soft feminine features and high cheekbones. My body shape declares my ripe femininity as blatantly as my scorns – I have wide childbearing hips, and my breasts are large in relation to my narrow waist and slim frame. From an era before it was appropriate, I’ve always drawn the predatory stares of men.

“Yes, I’ll protect you, Coora,” Jurong repeats as his gaze drops to my chest.

Jurong is a good-looking guy, for a human. Part of the tragedy of our relationship is that instead of wasting his efforts in a fruitless pursuit of me, he could have had his pick of the human females. Our college course has a lot more women than men. But while some human males like Jurong might lust for Dystyr females, we don’t reciprocate for human men. Dystyr women might be similar enough to human females that their males assume our tastes are the same, but Dystyr men are much larger – eight feet tall being an average male. Furthermore, our men have prominent bulges on their foreheads which the human men lack, and once you’re conditioned to like a certain look, well that’s that.

Dystyr do not reproduce by forming pair bonds, like the humans. Males struggle for dominance, and our fittest are rewarded by mating with many women. Thus, our males are highly territorial, and in our pre-history, they evolved to mark their boundaries with a pungent smelling urine. The fragrance conveys the virility and strength of the male.

Now we’re civilized, it’s not like our guys still pee in the corners of our homes, but one can’t undo genetics, and for us females, smell is an important factor. I fully comprehend this concept is gross to the humans who focus on the visual, but to Dystyr women – well, inhaling a high-quality version of that musk is quite a turn on. Stores discreetly sell bottles of the stuff as an aid for women masturbating. So for poor Jurong with his human height and smell – no dice.

The hall is getting busy now. It’s so loud with conversation that it’s difficult to hear the continuing strikes on the ship, but we can still feel them through the floor. All our class seem to have found each other, attracting more and more mass like we’re a planet forming.

A woman in an officer’s uniform steps onto the stage. She must be wearing a microphone, because I hear the sound of her clearing her throat amplified a hundredfold.

“Passengers,” she greets us as the crowd falls to sudden silence, “I am Oshia Trondo, first officer of the Moons of Odaron. The captain sends his apologies, but he needs to remain on the bridge dealing with the situation you’ve all noticed.”

“As you might have surmised, the ship is currently under attack by a pirate vessel. But you are in no danger, so we ask…”

“Where are they from?” interrupts a man at the front of the crowd.

Trondo hesitates, and then she says, “They are raiders from Aghara-Penthay.”

Trindii is one of the passengers, mostly women, who immediately scream. I’m silent, but otherwise little better - terror grips me also, and for a moment I think I’ll faint. The Slavers? The Slavers of Aghara-Penthay are attacking this transport? Gods help us all if they succeed.

“Silence!” barks the officer with as much authority as she can, but she still has to repeat herself. “Silence!”

The initial panic subsides slightly, but the crowd remain too fearful to be entirely calm.

“A distress call has been sent to Republic Prime and the fleet are converging on us even now. Although this transport has little armament, its shields are very strong. These ships are built to run, and hold out until rescue arrives. All the same, for your safety, I ask you to remain here, as far as possible from the outer hull. And do not attempt to make for the lifepods, unless the ship does fall. In a lifepod, you will be easily captured.”

Captured… I look around, as many, many of the women, are doing. I’m feeling very aware that I’m female. We all know what it means to be female, and captured by Aghara-Penthay.

“How many women are on this ship?” a man calls. He sounds hostile.

Trondo consults a note.

“One thousand, two hundred and forty-seven adult females. Nine hundred and sixty-three adult males. Non-binary species – two hundred and…”

“That’s too many women!” heckles the man angrily, as though he blames Trondo personally for the ratio. She flinches.

Asshole. There’s no need to be mean – as a woman, she must be scared too. Trondo is approaching her middle years, but she still holds a certain elegant beauty, and that means she will be thinking about the same fate every other remotely desirable female in this hall is fearing. The specialty of the Slavers of Aghara-Penthay – the business that’s made their fortune, is trading their women captives to meet the sexual desires of the galaxy’s men. There are no free women on Aghara-Penthay – to be female on their world is to automatically be a slave. Uncaptured women, i.e. those such as I, still free in the rest of the galaxy, are referred to by the Slavers using the vulgar title “cunts”. That’s all we are in their eyes. Cunts. The place between our legs is the only thing that matters. It’s us women who have the right to be emotional. Not the jerkoff saying there’s too many of us on board.

“What do you expect us to do?” Trondo retaliates, as pissed off as I am. “It’s not as though we can just hand over every attractive woman on the ship.”

“Why not?” he calls back. “The idea gets my vote.”

There’s angry muttering, mostly directed at him, but the seed of the idea that others might be saved has been planted now. The Slavers take some male slaves, but not many. The old, and most of the men on this ship, will die if the raiders make it on board. Sometimes fallen vessels hand over their women, and then the rest are be spared.

“They won’t break down the ship’s defenses before the Republic arrive,” Trondo rebukes. “And then you, Sir, will regret making such a suggestion.”

But she’s barely finished her sentence before there’s an even deeper boom then, caused by something vast knocking against the hull, and the sound carries even to here. The ship lurches again. At first there are a few screams, but then everyone stops to listen for clues, and so we all hear the engines cut out completely. I hadn’t realized how constant the noise of them was until it’s gone. In the sudden quiet more women scream, filling the silence.

“Are there any weapons on this ship?” another man, more politely, is asking Trondo.

“Not many,” she replies, and the fear is blooming in her voice now. “A few blasters on the bridge, but that’s all. These ships rely on being too big and too fast to attack. We shouldn’t need weapons.”

“The engines just quit, ma’am. We need weapons now,” someone says.

The ship’s public address system bursts into life, so sudden and so loud it makes me jump.

“This is the Captain of the Moons of Odaron. Slavers from Aghara-Penthay are boarding the ship. We can no longer hold them off, so our guidance has changed. All passengers and crew must make for the lifepods. Evacuate! Evacuate! Your Gods be with you. I wish you all good…” but before he can finish, his voice is cut off with a sound like a blast. If there’s any more broadcast after that, the announcement is drowned over the deafening cries of the passengers.

The Slavers of Aghara-Penthay are raiding the ship.

2 - Flight

Blind panic has taken over. I start screaming. Everyone is screaming. What are we to do? I couldn’t bear being caught alive, but I don’t want to die. People begin to flee, and instinctively I start to run with them, but I fly aimlessly, changing direction and then changing again. Our chances of evading the pirates in lifepods are little better than our chances on the ship, but just waiting here to be caught is intolerable. I have to try something.

I’m not half way to the exit from the hall when a blaster bolt, a real blaster bolt, zips over my head, causing panic as it smashes the ceiling and rains debris down on the fleeing masses. I’ve seen blasters on screen many times, but in all my life I’ve never actually been in the presence of a weapon discharging before. Only moments later, a grey-haired woman next to me falls, and in her torso I see a blackened smoking hole.

I freeze, staring in horror at remans that moments before were a living, thinking, being. Someone grabs my hand and I’m pulled roughly towards one of the corridors.

“This way,” he says. It’s Jurong.

I don’t know how he’s managing to stay so calm when most are barely managing to control the hysteria. The fallen are suddenly lying around us everywhere. Where minutes ago there was order, I now have to step over corpses to reach the corridors. How can so many be gone already? But although the devastation presents superficially as chaos, I have enough wits remaining to confirm there is a method in the carnage. Younger women and the strongest and most handsome young men are the only ones being spared. They’re lying stunned – frozen there as inert as waxworks. Those of us with value as slaves. Everyone else is being killed.

I hurry after Jurong. I’m willing to go with anyone with a coherent plan to save me. The prospect of rape at the hands of the Slavers would be devastating. I’m a Dystyr. I left my homeworld before mating, and like most of us who go offworld, I’ve remained a virgin. I can’t be a sex slave. I can’t be a sex slave.

And there’s something as horrific as the rape awaiting captives. Decades ago, the Slavers would suppress their captives with sheer brutality. But now they do something far more insidious. It’s called implantation. A biochip is injected into the brain stem at the base of the skull. The chip grows tendrils into the tissue, which emit signals interfering with the neurons relating to free will. The victim of an implant is unable to resist a command, so long as it’s delivered by a male. Order the victim to screw – they will screw. Death is not even an escape. The implant has many protocols besides obedience, including one which prevents a slave ending her life.

Women freshly captured by the Slavers are always taken first to the surface of Aghara-Penthay. There they’re implanted and often given further barbaric augmentations, and then they’re branded with the slave mark. It’s a swirling mark on the cheek to signify she is a processed woman. A quality control sign for the buyer. A lifelong badge of shame for the wearer.

Please no - this cannot happen to me.

“Where’s Trindii?” I moan to Jurong. I realize for the first time she is not with us. We’re being swept along with panicked passengers making for one of the lifepod bays. Civilization is beginning to break down. An old man has collapsed face down on the floor, clutching his chest, alive but fallen, and no one helps him. Including us.

“Trindii is on her own now,” Jurong says harshly. “This way.”

Instead of following the herd, he pulls me roughly into a deserted corridor of cabins. These rooms are better class than the shared accommodation purchased on a student budget, which offered us little more than twin bunks. Through the open doors I see large double beds, loungers, viewing screens.

“This way,” Jurong repeats, hurrying. “Here,” and choosing one apparently at random, he pushes me inside.

“What are we doing?” I ask him, confused. “We can’t hide for long. They will have life scanners. They’ll search the ship.”

Maybe his plan is we try to conceal ourselves long enough for the Republic to arrive. Maybe he intends to shift from cabin to cabin and try to slip past the searchers. Hide and move, hide and move.

Jurong hits the pad to close the cabin door.

“Wait! We should go to the escape bays, Jurong. The ship has fallen. If the lifepods all launch together, at least we have chance,” I tell him, turning to leave, but he pushes me with all his strength, so I almost fly back onto the bed, and his true intent dawns on me. Immediately I start to lever myself up, but he quickly throws himself on top of me, and I scream. I can feel it pressing against me. That’s his erection that I can feel. That’s Jurong’s penis.

“No!” I plead, trying to push him away. “Jurong - No!”

Sometimes, I just hate men. We should be fleeing for our lives, and Jurong choses now to get an erection.

“We’re lost anyway, Coora,” he grunts in my ear, his voice heavy with lust. “Hear those men? If you’re gonna get fucked anyway, I’m going to have you first.”

I do hear them. Amidst the screams from outside are the unmistakable sounds of blaster weapons, and the shouting of hostile male voices.

“No!” I protest again – louder, more urgent. I’m continuing to fight him, but he’s stronger than me, and he has the advantage of his weight bearing down on my body. His hand first seeks my breast, and I’m unable to prevent him squeezing me. So it’s come to this. He’s won his wish. Finally, he’s got to touch what he’s imagined for so long.

“Gods Coora, you’re perfect,” Jurong tells me, and he buries his face in my neck. His human stubble is alien to me, and I hate the scratching and his hot breath. I struggle with all my strength to escape from under him, but it’s not enough to break loose.

“Help!” I scream. As though in the middle of a pirate attack, anyone is going to attend to one woman’s cries.

Jurong releases my breast, but only so he can start hitching up the fabric of my dress. I wish I’d fastened it all the way down now. I’m lucky I closed enough that most of the fabric is tight, and the task requires both hands. This means he only gains slow progress with our combined weights inhibiting him, and I’m resisting every inch of exposure, but gradually he wins, and I end up with cloth rumpled like a concertina around my hips. My legs are now bared completely to him – skin he’s never seen before - and he pauses a moment to caress my thigh.

“Jurong,” I say, “Please don’t. Don’t touch me.”

Jurong freezes, but not because my plea produced any positive effect.

“Wait. Quiet, Coora. Listen!” he says in a harsh whisper.

I hear more screaming, from somewhere very close. A voice cries out then is suddenly cut off. A man laughs without mirth.

“We don’t have long,” he says, and reaches for me again.

There’s a painfully sharp tug at my pelvis, as next, my panties are ripped forcefully away. I’m left in a state of unbearable openness without them. My newly naked genitals are pressing against his erection. Only the layers of his pants are between us now. Jurong reaches down, fumbling for the fastening to free himself.

I scream as loud as I can this time. Perhaps the fear of discovery by the Slavers will stop him.

“Be quiet, you fool!” he snaps.

Please, why won’t someone come? I have only seconds remaining to do something, and it’s going to be down to me to save myself. Looking round for any form of aid, I stretch desperately for the only thing in range. It’s a glass ornament – the form something alien and unknown to me. It’s heavy, but I can lift it with one hand.

Jurong releases himself from his pants and gods help me, I can feel him – exposed man pressing exposed female. The flesh of his cock is warm. There’s no softness to his organ at all. It’s as though a rod of iron is probing against my pudenda. In moments he’ll back up his hips to where he can point the foul thing at me, and the rape will begin. I have to do something. I’m not normally savage, but I’m not normally desperate. With no other option left, I swing the ornament into the side of his skull. It strikes with a sickening crunch. Jurong’s eyes roll back in his head, and at last I’m able to push him off me.

I’m on my feet as quickly as I can get up. In spite of the urgency I still pause to push my dress back into its correct place around my legs. The coverage is a blissful relief.

I look down at Jurong. For a moment he’s so still I think I’ve killed him, but then like a jump-started speeder, he jolts and groans. His cock is still out his pants. The erection is beginning to shrink. Gods it’s disgusting. How could anyone want that inside their body?

I spit down on him, venting my venom.

“Asshole,” I say.

The compulsion to escape Jurong is so strong I’ve hit the door release and I’m in the corridor before thinking of my safety. There’s a body on the floor right outside – one that wasn’t there before. An older male, face down, with a blaster hole the size of a dinner plate burnt out the back. There’s no more time to consider the dead. Which way are the lifepods?

My heart pounding, I choose a direction at random. But it’s the wrong one. After only seconds, at the junction ahead of me, two Slaver troops walk right around the corner. They’re mooching – not even looking for prisoners. Simultaneously we see each other.

The larger of the two men, a dark skinned, unshaven fellow, grins.

“Hello, pretty.”

Without hesitation, I turn the other way, and I run for my life. The adrenaline spike of fear makes it feel like everything happens in slow motion.

Behind me, the men murmur something to each other.

Perhaps they let me hope for a moment, perhaps, because I almost manage to reach the junction. Then something hits me in the back like the punch from a giant fist. I find myself sprawled face first on the floor before I know it. I try to move, but my muscles don’t seem to respond to commands. I can’t even move my eyes. I must just stare at the patterned laminate covering the floor until a Slaver boot fills my view. There is a red dust on it. The ground from Aghara-Penthay. My instinctive urge to get up and run is overwhelming, but I can’t budge an inch.

“Well ain’t you a catch?” a man says to me. “How did you slip past the others?”

I know what’s happened. Blaster weapons, of the type which have just struck me, come with stun and kill settings. Pirate groups long ago found that it was too easy to make mistakes switching between settings, so they adopted a tactic of having raiders work in twos. One man with the kill setting eliminates threats, and those who have no value. The other, with stun, aims at live captures.

I’ve just been stunned. I’m lost now. I’m beautiful, I’m woman, and they called me pretty, so they want me alive.

I feel a hand invade between my legs and my dress sliding up for the second time. I can’t turn to see who’s doing it, but his hand traces his path up my skin with dreadful slowness.

“Gotta check her hidden for weapons,” the Slaver says to his companion, and then, to my shame he calls, “Guess what, Tren? No panties on. We have ourselves a slut.”

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.

I’m hoping we’ll be left alone at least until reaching the Slavers’ world, but as soon as we’re underway, our captors resume our torments. A man’s shouting becomes audible over the din of panicked captives.

“Women to the front of the hold. Men to the back!”

In the throng, I don’t know which way is which, but those nearer the edge can probably see him gesturing, so keeping a tight grip on Trindii’s arm I simply follow the rest of the herd.

I‘m aiming to try and keep in the center of the female group, where it’s safest, but in the direction we’re moving, Trindii and I end up near the back, and when we stop again, we find ourselves at the edge of a large circle of galactic womanhood. There must be hundreds of us here. Across from the females’ circle, I see the much smaller group of males. Briefly I note Jurong is not among them, but that’s all the thought I’m willing to give to him. Demanding my immediate attention are the men between our circles – Slavers with officer rank. The captain is quite the ugliest man I’ve ever seen – a short fellow with a black beard, morbidly obese with lank greasy hair.

“Prisoners - form into lines,” he commands. “An arm’s width apart. Spread yourselves out.”

With no sensible options but obey, we shuffle ourselves around according to his orders. Like any new recruits, the procedure is disorganized, and it takes some time. But eventually we find ourselves arranged in position. In front of me is a pretty blonde girl. I do not know her – she isn’t part of our course group. To my left is Trindii. To my right there is only open space, and then the men. I’m still on the edge of the female ranks.

I look down with broken heart at my precious dress. I know what must be coming, but it doesn’t make it any easier to bear.

“Now strip!” orders the captain. “Strip. Everything. No clothing. No jewelry. Put everything in a pile to your right.”

No! They can’t make me do this. Not in front of everyone.

A few women tentatively start pulling at jackets and footwear, but most, like me, look around uncertainly. Our guards seem to be expecting this. Before the officer has finished speaking, Slavers are already moving down the lines, activating shock collars on those who delay. My attacker unfortunately comes from behind me, and I’m on the floor before I know it, my body so rigid from the electric fire that I can’t even scream.

They only zap me for a moment – it’s a warning, not a punishment. The pain has gone and the guard has already moved past me and is torturing some other unfortunate. But it was enough. I scramble back to my feet. I’m not sure why, but my thighs have started aching.

I know it’s inevitable that I’ll finish up completely undressed in front of all these people, so it doesn’t really matter what goes first. But we all seem to instinctively remove the least intimate layers first. Reaching down, I pull my boots off my feet. The alloy floor of the hold feels cool, and hard on my soles. Barefoot, I drop my boots next to me, at my right, as I was ordered. My heart is pounding. Gods, this is unbearable. When will I next be lucky enough to have any covering on my feet?

At my left, Trindii is already down to her underwear. She looks around self-consciously, waiting for the others to catch up, but a guard notices her hesitation, and he activates her collar. The sight of my dear friend enduring such suffering wrenches my heart. Oh, Trindii - is that what I looked like when they tortured me? She convulses uncontrollably, and her face locks in a rictus of pain.

I start pulling at the fastenings for my dress. I’m aware I’ve got no panties on underneath – Jurong tore them from me – but there’s nothing I can do about that, and it’s not as though I’d have been allowed to keep them much longer anyway.

Next to me Trindii is unhooking her bra. Self-consciously, she lets it fall down her arms, baring her oversize breasts. Her nipples, a paler color than the rest of her java skin, are small in comparison to such fleshy balloons.

Meanwhile the last of my fastenings comes apart, and I can’t make the task of undoing my dress last any longer. Well, here goes. First, I ease it back off my shoulders exposing my cleavage, uplifted and presented even by my simple bra. Then my slim, flat belly is revealed, with the wide childbearing hips an advert of fertility in both the human world and the Dystyr one.

And then I do perhaps the bravest thing I’ve ever done, and I drop my dress to the floor. Gods, this is unbearable. I have to choke back the urge to cry. All I can think of is the way my bare ass and my core have just been exposed before a huge crowd. I cup my hand over the familiar folds of my sex organ. Dystyr are entirely hairless, and I don’t even have the protection of pubic hair afforded to the human females. I can feel my scorns touching my naked buttocks.

I make the mistake of glancing around. Most of the male captives are nude now. Some hide their genitals much as I’m doing. Some stand shameless. Many are watching the women strip. The majority of the men cling to their ingrained civility, and have the decency to glance only surreptitiously, but a few are leering blatantly. I look away. Around me almost all the women are naked. Trindii steps out her flimsy panties, and sorrowfully discards them on her pile. Then she begins to pull at her earrings. I wonder why she didn’t remove her jewelry first.

I try to unclip my bra with one hand so I can hide my groin, but it’s too difficult. Blushing with embarrassment I temporarily surrender the covering for my crotch, and I reach between my shoulder blades with both hands. I’m desperate to pause for a last second before yielding my final piece of clothing, but then I see a Slaver is watching and waiting with open enjoyment, the shock activator ready in his hand. His eyes flicker between my unprotected core and my chest. Scared almost to the point of panic, I slide the straps of my bra down my arms, and drop it quickly, that I might use one arm to conceal my chest and return my other to cup my groin.

I’m naked.

I’m naked, completely naked, in front of all of these people. Yes, my sex organ is concealed by my hand, and my nipples are hidden by pressing them into my arm, but my breasts are full, and for a woman with my proportions it’s impossible to conceal the swellings of my chest completely. No one would mistake me for a male for even a second. Hanging down my back are my scorns – another symbol of womanhood, which rest against my bare rump. Gods help me, I’m done for. I’m a naked female captive on a Slaver ship.

I look around me while continuing to concealing my privates as best as I can. The last of the prisoners are completing their process of undressing. No one offers our captors any more resistance, as though the removal of clothing took with it our spirits. The nude males are remaining stony-faced, but many of the women are crying. I wish they wouldn’t – it’s hard enough keeping my own emotions under control without the effect on me of their woes.

Trindii has her arms clamped over her body, much as I have. I hope my attempt at modesty does not look as futile as hers does.

And then I see my first slavegirl. My first live slavegirl, I think, although immediately I realize that isn’t true – all the women around me, including myself, are already slavegirls. But this one has on her face the mark of a woman processed on Aghara-Penthay – the Slaver’s equivalent of a symbol of quality. She has been marked because she has an implant injected into her brainstem – a fate feared by women across the galaxy.

I study her expression to try and see some sign of the abomination she carries – perhaps I’m expecting the glazed eyes of a zombie. But she looks perfectly normal, alert even, like any normal human female, except for the black swirling mark imprinted on the side of her head and her near-nudity in the Aghara-Penthay slave wrap.

The wraps are another defining symbol of Aghara-Penthay. A rectangular piece of silken fabric, the wrap fastens with a bow under the slave’s arm, so it can be easily removed even while the wearer is in any form of restraint. The garment is meant to excite the observer as much as conceal. It wraps around the wearer like a bath towel, but one which is too small.

Each is custom fitted to the slave so it hides just enough. With the nipples covered, the lower hem barely covers the pudenda, and the rump. At the side, there is deliberate design to provide not quite sufficient fabric to close, so it leaves a gaping swath of flesh exposed which hints at the shape of the wearer’s breasts. There is no lower fastening, so lean forward or back, and a woman exposes herself. Underwear is not permitted for slaves, so wearing a wrap, a slave is forced to constantly be aware of her body, and her slavery. Copied wraps sell in vast quantities across the galaxy. Husbands buy them for their wives to model in the bedroom. Women buy them to surprise their partners. A harmless erotic thrill for some, an everyday horror for too many.

The girl in the wrap moves along the line collecting our clothing and bundling it into a sack. There is no sorting to simplify returning items – this is collection only for disposal. I tremble as I understand I won’t ever be getting that beloved dress back. It was expensive. Underneath the covering of my arms, I can feel only my skin. I am naked. Me, and all these other naked women around me.

Other slaves move along other lines. There are too many captives for one servant to deal with all their property.

“Thank you,” I tell the one who takes my things. She does not reply.

Men move down our lines, then. Slaver men. I can see them visiting first the girls at the front of the rows, then advancing one by one along the ranks, so I have enough time to try and comprehend what’s coming. First, two men approach the captive. Then she puts her hands on her head, and parts her legs, so they get see everything. That is going to feel unbearable. The men consult each other. They write a number on her left thigh. And they move along. Five away from me. Four away. Three away. Each time it takes about thirty seconds to receive this… inspection?

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.

“That’s right, in you go, sweet-tits,” he says.

Once I’m fully within, the guard slams the door, and I hear the click of an electronic lock.

It doesn’t take long to examine of my new surroundings. The ceiling is only an inch above my arched back, so I can’t sit up, not even enough to rest back on my heels. The door – a wire mesh of alloy designed so I can’t hide from the corridor - is at my right, and the remaining sides are plain alloy. Each face of my box is only inches away, so there’s no possibility of shifting to a different position. And the only other feature in here with me is a disgusting thing that looks like a dildo – a pale pink artificial erect phallus, so realistic it even has veins and an opening at the tip. It’s so near to me I bump my face against it if I lift my head from my knees.

The noise in this prison gradually diminishes as the last captives are caged.

I can’t see enough from inside my small box to confirm when the loading is complete, but a guard gives us instructions.

“We don’t want pretties like you harming yourselves before you get your implants,” he gloats. “So the shipment cages have been fitted with AI. You will hear this tone:” and there is a loud single note sounds, “and you must drain the nutri-fluid from the feeding tube in front of you. Fail to take all the fluid, or refuse to feed, and this will happen:”

And yet again, they make us scream. Where my knees and feet touch the alloy floor it feels like the goad – an intense jolt of white-hot pain. Instinctively I try to straighten to evade the agony, but that only presses my back against the roof, which also burns like a sun. But as immediately as it arrived the pain is gone. I feel nothing – there’s no trace, even though it felt like my skin was burning away.

In the aftermath I can hear women weeping from the other cages, their sounds ranging from gentle sobs to near hysteria.

The pirate didn’t sound as though he’d finished speaking, but there’s no more word from the guards. None of us know if they’re waiting. We can each only see one small portion of the empty corridor through the mesh. It’s about five minutes before anyone dares ask, “have they gone?” and another female voice replies, “I think so.”

A daring soul calls, “Sir?” and no one answers.

“What are we going to do?” someone then wails, too loudly, and another voice snaps angrily, “We’re going to be quiet! Or you’ll end up bringing them back.”

“But what can we do?” another woman asks, more quietly, and the angry one answers this too, ”What do you think we’re going to do? We’re going to get implanted, and then what we’re going to do is get fucked by men. We’ll fuck every one they want us to fuck.”

She’s right. With a moment to think, the hopelessness of situation comes crashing in on me. Next thing, a big wet tear drips down my cheek and onto my bare knee. I’m locked stark naked in a cage, and I’m on my way to Aghara-Penthay. I’m lost. It’s only a matter of time before I’m raped. No! Why me? Why did I have to be a woman? Why did I have to be pretty? I can feel my full breasts squashed into my thighs. I’d been pleased to have that chest once, but now it’s just gonna bring me misery. I wish I could chop the things off. My bare pelvis is thrust out behind me, so my rear feels very vulnerable. My scorns rest on my naked back. I hope there’s not a camera in the back wall, or anyone peeking will get an obscene view of my holes. Needing to do something, I manage to shift my arm enough to try and rub away the demeaning mark the wrote on me, my forty-nine, but the ink seems indelible.

A couple of minutes later, the buzzer we were taught about sounds for the first time.

I don’t have the courage left to defy my captors, so I hastily take the head of the phallus in my mouth and suck it greedily. The fake penis turns out to be the temperature of a human body, as is the liquid it dispenses. A viscous fluid fills my mouth. It tastes of salt, and something unpleasant that I can’t identify. I swallow it back, but the slimy substance coats my throat. My torso heaves with revulsion, and I think I’m going to retch, but I force back the urge and continue to suck on the disgusting thing in front of me. The other women must also be obeying, for there are no further screams.

The tone ceases, but I keep sucking until the penis is dry. After I’m done, I can’t get rid of the taste and the feeling of that slime. And so, in this condition, for a short time there’s nothing for me to do but wait, looking down at the cage floor and at my own smooth knees, while I have a moment free from harassment.

But we’re not left alone for long.

I hear the sound of multiple male voices approaching.

“Hello, sexy,” a man’s voice says to someone, from a spot a few cages behind me. “Forty-seven? I think you deserve better than that. I’d core you raw.”

And then they move along the ranks, commenting and discussing on other women, as though we’re nothing more than objects.

“Chest is too flat,” one girl gets told. Another: “I don’t like the dark ones.”

Then the voices are outside my grille.

“A prize piece of alien cunt,” is someone’s judgement. “Always good for variety, the alien ones.”

I look down steadily at the floor between my knees. Already I can guess that making eye contact will probably invite more trouble. My strategy works, and to my relief they move on, and I don’t even see the man who just reduced me and all my hopes, fears, dreams, tastes, to one sentence: “a prize piece of alien cunt”.

Shortly after that, all this group of men leave, but they’re not by any means the last visitors. I don’t know if all the rooms of captives are receiving similar attention, but our wall of cages, where the highest scoring women are being kept, seems to be a popular venue for sightseeing by the Slaver crew. I try not to pay attention as I repeatedly hear lewd and disgusting comments on my body, unless I’m addressed directly and obliged to answer. They’re just words, and we’re all getting similar treatment, but after an unknown time has passed, something happens where I’m no longer able to blend into the herd.

“Here she is,” a gravelly male voice is saying, and the sound of his voice comes from right next to me. “Hey, you - the green cunt, look round.”

I wish I could stare ahead but it’s riskier to disobey this man than to comply, so I turn my head and I see him. It is the tall unwashed man, he who was scoring Trindii’s line, and he who caught me looking at him with disapproval. Around him stand three of his colleagues, each an equally repellant lowlife.

“Hello, hooters,” he says. “I told you we’d come back for you.”

4 - Soiled

It’s more difficult to climb down from the cage than it was to get inside. My muscles have started to seize up in that cramped space, and when I half-tumble out, one of the men has to catch my elbow, like he’s being chivalrous.

I stand on the floor, surrounded, ashamed of my nakedness, and instinctively I recross my arm across my breasts, and cup my vulva with my other hand. Like that’s going to protect me from what’s coming.

I realize they’re not removing any of the other women. They’re here just for me. Before these males, I’m shaking with terror.

“Please,” I beg humbly. “I’m sorry if I offended you, Sir. Just let me go back in my cage, and I won’t do it again.”

From my position in the corridor I now can see inside some of the other cages. None of the other women are looking this way. They’re just thanking the gods that I’ve been chosen for what’s about to happen, and not them.

“Come with us, hooters,” the unwashed man says, grabbing my elbow, and he tries to pull me along the corridor. I look back uncertainly.

“Just me? Not all of us?” I query, betraying the others around me.

Another guard, a big burly fellow, lazily waves one of their pain batons at me, so I know the price I’ll pay if I don’t cooperate. So I give in, and let the unwashed man lead me. I proceed to my fate, surrounded by his three companions. I can smell the unwashed one’s stale odor, even at this distance.

It was bad enough being nude before others when I was one of the crowd, but alone with these men, I feel bitterly conscious of my nakedness and vulnerability. I pad along with the men on my bare feet, chest and sex covered with my arms, but knowing I can do nothing to conceal the feminine curves of my rump - fully displayed to the two males behind me.

Again we pass the cage where the male captives are held. The women in there have fallen quiet now. On a filthy mattress on the cell floor, I see Trindii is in the embrace of a big male. He holds her as closely and as intimately as if they’re lovers. She’s not moving. She has her back to the bars, her body as limp as a rag doll, and I can’t see if she’s still conscious. It’s probably a mercy if she’s not.

One of my escorts - a grey-haired guard with a hoarse voice, old enough to be my grandfather, is watching me.

“Want to join the cunts in there?” he asks gruffly. “Be grateful you’re one of the pretty ones, forty-nine, so you’re spared that. But if you’re not nice to us, it can still happen.”

After that warning, we only have to go a couple of junctions further on before we reach our final destination.

The cabin, if that’s what it is, is as bare as a prison cell. There’s nothing but the bed in here, a steel framed bed, bolted to the floor in case the ship shakes during combat. It sits out in the center of the room, with no bedhead or footer. Just that awful frame to support the mattress, a mattress which is so clinically crisp and white that it could be for a hospital.

But this is a rape room.

“No,” I plead, my stomach dropping through the floor. It’s hopeless but I’m trying to reverse back out, but I’m already inside the cabin, and the two men behind me cut off my exit. A hand shoves my bare shoulder blade and I stumble further forward.

“Hit the door, Corrick,” says the unwashed one to the giant. “And lock it. We don’t want to be interrupted.”

“Please, please, please,” I’m begging. This can’t be about to happen to me! As the door closes, sealing us in, I try desperately to figure some plan to evade the inevitable, but the men are already on me. Powerful arms lift me into the air, their sweaty hands seeming to be on me everywhere, and I’m flung roughly down onto the mattress. I race back onto my knees, trying to get up, but I’m pushed down again. It’s my first experience of a physical contest against males, and it is a shock. Gods, these men are so much stronger than me, and on top of that they have the advantage of weight as well.

“You all hold her down,” the unwashed one growls to his friends. “I’ll go first.” He’s already fumbling with his pants. I scream.

The gang comply, and quickly I’m pinned down by them onto my back, one man pressing hard down on each of my shoulders and arms. The pressure from their weight is like a vice. I’m kicking wildly and shaking my torso from side to side, trying to dislodge my assailants, but I might as well have concrete blocks on top of me.

I scream again. They’re not holding me with my head resting at the top of the bed, where a pillow would be. My head is halfway down, so my hips are almost at the lower edge of the mattress. They’re holding me so my core is left accessible.

The two men who aren’t trapping my arms move into position, aiming to restraining my legs. I thrash out my feet, trying to strike my attackers with a heel, and I manage to land a decent blow to the unwashed man’s hip.

But the other one, the big man, catches my right ankle, and with it my right leg is suddenly gripped tight. I jab with my free heel at his hand, hoping to hurt him enough for him to releases me. Taking the offensive is a mistake, as it allows the unwashed one time to close in. He seizes my left ankle, and next thing I know my knees are being spread wide, and then I’m trapped in a pose where I’m so terribly, terribly open. My core, my sex, my most private place, is on full view to them.

Unwashed one waits between my legs. I’m still thrashing around, bucking so my hips lift from the mattress, but he’s closing and I’m going nowhere.

I scream again. The smell from him is nauseating.

“Hold her other ankle as well, Corrick” unwashed one says to the giant. My legs should be stronger than this Corrick’s arms, but he’s able to secure one ankle in each hand, and flail as I might I can’t break free. Thus, Corrick stands between my spread feet, keeping my legs apart, one man pinning down each arm / shoulder, and the unwashed man moves even nearer between my knees. He’s so close now that every time I twist and turn I’m brushing against him. Helplessly I’m looking down my naked body at him, and I watch him extract his penis from his loose pants.

“No, please,” I beg him. Don’t let it be this way, please. Of all the men in the universe to claim me first, not one of these animals. Not this foul creature, unclean and unshaven.

He’s already hard. His organ is the most repulsive thing I’ve ever seen, pointing out at me like some eyeless worm. The crown is engorged with blood, turning it a deeper shade than his shaft. He’s anointing it, lovingly smearing his shaft with some kind of glistening oil. So Slavers carry round lubricant for these occasions.

“Yeah, cunt!” he declares as he sees my wide eyes.

I’m still bucking and rolling my hips – the only part of my body where I have much movement remaining to resist. But it’s easy for the unwashed one to use his bodyweight and pin my abdomen to the mattress. Then I feel the head of his sex pressing against my nether lips. That’s the second time today I’ve been in contact with a penis. But with Jurong, I was able to hit him with the sculpture and save myself. This time I’m…

I scream as he buries himself into me, going deep all in one thrust. The pain feels like something has just ripped apart inside me. There’s nothing remotely pleasurable about it. But the unwashed one groans, as though for him the connection between our bodies is the best experience in the universe.

“Oh, that’s good,” he tells his buddies. “She’s so tight.”

I couldn’t imagine the suffering I’m enduring might get worse after that first stab, but then he starts drawing his hips backwards and forwards – thrusting into me and retreating, thrust and retreat, and each time it’s like enduring a sword between my legs. I tip back my head, my eyes rolling. The psychological pain is almost as bad as the physical. I don’t want to give these men pleasure. I hate them. And yet they’re enjoying me anyway, enjoying my flesh, enjoying my downfall. We’re mating. Having sex. Fucking. He’s raping me. Each thrust which forces me to cry out is an absolute victory for them and a humiliating defeat for me. So complete is the unwashed one’s power he’s able to pin down my pelvis with only one hand on my abdomen, and start using the other to explore and enjoy me. My breasts are his main target. I struggle to try and evade him, in spite of the increased pain any movement induces between my legs, but I don’t have enough freedom to escape the hands. When he touches me, he squeezes my chest as though the swellings are lumps of dough, and he pulls at my nipples, triggering further intense stimulation.

I scream again, but no one comes to my rescue. There’s no one on a Slaver ship that would save me anyway.

“So, bitch, how’s about showing that attitude of yours now, huh?” groans the unwashed one. Why must he be so cruel? There’s no need to taunt me. Please stop – I surrender. I can feel his penis probing deep inside me. He slaps my face, shocking me, and then even worse, he strikes me across the breasts.

The Dystyr are a peaceful people, and violence is rare among us. It would seem inconceivable to a Dystyr to take pleasure from another’s suffering. But the humans don’t seem to be wired that way. The unwashed one even seems to like the way I cry out when he slaps me across the breasts. Perhaps it’s my display of such unbearable torment which, a moment later, pushes him over the edge, or maybe it is the prolonged friction from my vaginal walls against his penis. Either way, I witness the moment when this rank, disgusting male cries out and presses his pelvis as hard as he can against my pubic bone, and holds himself there. His whole body seems to be tensed, and the expression on his face is hideous. Inside me, I feel his rock-hard penis make a lurching movement.

Unwashed male keeps that position only for a few seconds, then he gasps, half-slumping over me as though he’s going to faint. I’m not too innocent to understand.

Before the Slavers I was a virgin, but that vile human has just orgasmed inside me.

“Gods, that was a spectacular fuck,” he groans to his friends. “It’s been a while since I’ve been in a woman that fresh.”

With that pronouncement he withdraws from me, and once again I shriek. The slicing pain of him exiting is almost as bad as the penetration. I can feel a hot wetness dribbling out after him between my legs. Blood, semen or both, I don’t know.

I, Coora of the Dystyr, have just been raped. Each year it happens to so many women across the universe, but this is different. It was my body that was defiled. My life has divided in two forever – into the time before I was raped, and the time afterwards. Before, I was Coora, the woman. Now the Republic defines me as Coora, the victim.

“Who’s next?” says the unwashed one.

Next? He can’t be serious?

“No!” I plead, beginning to twist and turn anew.

“Me,” says the giant. None of the men care that my life has been ruined and I begin to cry, such is the depths of my despair. I’m kicking and struggling, but the unwashed man still easily swaps places with the giant who was holding my ankles. Unwashed man’s grip is almost as strong as his colleague, and freeing myself is equally impossible while the giant, Corrick, takes his place between my thighs.

“No Corrick, please no!” I beg, thinking that perhaps a personal appeal, using his name, will help. But he removes his cock from his pants just the same is the unwashed one did. Corrick is only semi-erect, but even in this state his organ is already as oversized as he is.

“No, please, you’ll kill me!”

He anoints himself with the same lubricating oil the other one used, and Corrick rubs the shaft of himself to arouse his penis to full hardness. I’m hoping he won’t succeed in becoming rigid enough to penetrate me, but the sensation for him of reaching out and squeezing my defenseless breast, coupled with the act of masturbation, is erotic enough to do the trick. A second man’s head presses firmly against the crevice between my nether lips. I’d been hoping the first rape would have numbed me or opened me enough to reduce the suffering from the second, but the piercing penetration of Corrick’s giant penis is agony. How many times today must I scream?

“Yes, nice tight cunt,” agrees Corrick as he begins drawing back, so he’s almost completely withdrawn from inside me, and then thrusting back to his hilt.

I must also cry out which each of this male’s thrusts, so intense is my agony. I’m still struggling, but impaled on Corrick’s cock, my movements remain limited unless I want to cause more suffering for myself. I resist for as long as I can, but by the time Corrick’s rape has settled into a regular rhythm, my strength is beginning to fail, and my will to fight them is diminishing. These men will fuck me whatever I do. I turn my head to the side so I don’t have to look at Corrick’s face, and try to distract myself by counting the hairs on the man’s arm.

I didn’t think my suffering could get any worse after Corrick climaxes inside me – in fact I could believe I’ll not feel anything inside me for the rest of my life after being stuffed by that monster. But then the old one, with the grey hair, announces he wants to rape me in the ass.

“No! No!” I wail. Dystyr don’t do such an unspeakable thing!

I resummon my reserves of stamina for a fresh effort at self-defense, thinking I might prevent myself being flipped onto my belly, but for this new indignity they don’t even try to roll me over. The men obligingly pull my ankles up so my body is folded at the waist, and my feet are almost level with my ears. I’m presented obscenely. Before today, simply being displayed to strangers like this would have been enough trauma to scar me. In the pose, I can’t avoid seeing myself, and knowing how they must see me. There is nothing but my nude iridescent skin. Naked, weak and pathetic, I am a bare and vulnerable female amongst clothed men.

The old one also lubricates himself, but even with the help of lubricant my anus isn’t able to accommodate something that size. The head of him presses against my ring of muscle, and yet again there is agony as something tears inside me. Gods, this is unbearable. I’m not even permitted the honor of bravely enduring it. I’m again reduced to screaming and sobbing, moaning in defeat with each one of a brutal rapist’s thrust, so he knows how completely he’s destroying me.

“So fresh, so tight,” is the old one’s verdict. His voice is husky, as though he’s smoked narcotic weed all his life. He’s not much of a man, but he’s superior enough to me to take me anyway. How can this be allowed? I was a free citizen only hours earlier, asleep in my bunk. Now I’m a captive of the Slavers, stripped, raped, and degraded.

The old one rams against my buttocks, making me shriek as he climaxes. It feels as though there’s a rod probing deep into my bowels. And the pain from when he withdraws and is gone is almost as bad.

The youngest one, acne-covered, gangly and barely out of his adolescence, perhaps is the lowest status, and thus must use me last. It’s a measure of how low I’ve fallen in a such a short time that it’s a relief that this one wants to rape me vaginally. His penis is hideous to me – veined and ugly, rearing like an eyeless worm from an untidy nest of pubic hair. But it’s as thin as he is, so compared to the giant Corrick, there’s relatively little pain from the penetration.

Unfortunately, one of his comrades notices this.

“Look at her - she can barely feel your tiny dick, Seegar,” the unwashed one gloats.

This angers the male called Seegar. It seems there is a type of male for whom rape for him is not just sexual gratification. He wants to defeat me. So Seegar begins to slap me even more savagely across my breasts, swinging his arm backwards and forward like some living pendulum. My arms are out at my sides, pinned down against the mattress by the old one and the unwashed one, so there’s not the least thing I can do to protect myself from this abuse. It’s as bad as being punched, each blow sending my senses reeling, over and over.

“Please don’t, it hurts!” I beg him, hoping that some show of humility will soothe his wounded pride.

“That’s right, bitch, fear me!” Seegar crows, but the force behind his blows does seem to reduce. I believe my pleading has had another effect when he withdraws suddenly. For a hopeful moment I think I’ve aroused him to climax, and it’s over.

“Bring her head to the edge of the mattress,” Seegar orders. “Gonna shoot my load over her pretty face.”

“No!” I plead, although I’m not sure that having it on my face is any worse than him releasing inside me. My opinion doesn’t matter. The three men maneuver me so quickly it’s as though I’m weightless.

Seegar’s organ is poised just above me. I thought it looked disgusting before it went inside me, but now it glistens, with a bloody slime that’s a mix of my own secretions and semen from the men. He’s so close I can smell the stench of sex and shame, wafting as he pumps his cock with vigorous jerks of his left hand.

The ejaculation comes without warning – a warm sticky mass that spatters diagonally across my face. It’s not the worst thing that’s happened to me today, but I flinch instinctively, and I blink, for some of the foul stuff goes in my eye.

“Mmm,” Seegar groans, a moan of unbearable pleasure which contrasts my own emotions. “That’s right girl, that’s the good stuff.”

A second pulse of his seed follows the first, soiling a wider area over my cheek. And this disgrace, thank the Gods, at last seems to signal it’s over.

“Everyone had their fun? We’d better get back before we’re missed,” the unwashed one says abruptly. The brutal tone he used for me has gone like it was never there, switching to one as perfunctory as if he’s giving instructions in the office. This is not a man who has just participated in a gang rape, taking a young woman’s virginity by force, hurting her, and ruining her. He’s nothing but an administrator.

“Let her up.”

I’m released so suddenly that I stay there for a moment. The hands that restrained me so completely are gone. Gingerly, I push myself up into a sitting position on the mattress. Even that small movement triggers awful new stabbing pains from between my legs and in my backside. I’m certain they’ve damaged me.

I’m already defeated, and I make no further attempt to conceal my nakedness. Besides, the rape is over, and it will take a while for the men to regain their vigor.

“On your feet, forty-nine,” the unwashed one orders me, “hurry up! Don’t be a lazy slut.”

They gave me a command, so painfully I stand.

Upright I feel even worse. My insides heave with cramps. The muscles in my legs are shaking uncontrollably. I feel wet in a wrong way, in all my private places. I’m not sure if I’m bleeding or if it’s fluid from the men. On my cheeks, the tears which ran freely down my face are mixing with the youngest one’s sticky sperm, forming a mass which slowly oozes downwards under the ship’s artificial gravity.

Instinctively I move to clean my face, but Seegar stops me abruptly.

“Wipe that away, and the hand you used to do it gets cut off,” he barks, and I freeze.

I let my hands fall to my sides, and the badge of his shame continues to slide uninhibited down my face.

“Thanks for the classic bang, forty-nine,” says the unwashed one. “You’ll probably get fucked more times than you can count where you’re going, but they say a slave always remembers her first.”

And I’m sure I will.

The Coora who returns to the small racks of cages is not the same woman as the one who left. And not just because I can barely walk. I am forever one who was defeated, someone who has been soiled and broken, and I will remain degraded for always. The other captives, kneeling, hunched over and naked in their tiny prisons, hide their faces and do not look at me as the four rapists return me to my own place. I don’t blame these females for turning from me. These women will know exactly what’s just happened – they’ll be able to hear my broken breathing and my faltering, limping steps - and they will be fearful of receiving the same fate.

The unwashed one unlocks my cage. I’m not even strong enough clamber back into the small box. He has to shove me on the bare buttock to hurry me along.

“You stink of sex worse than a cheap whore, sweet-tits,” he tells me as the door is locked. “Try to clean yourself up before we dock.”

That was none of my fault, but all the same, he’s right. The smell from my own body is repellant to me, the rank stench of the men’s fluid mixing with my own secretions. Hunched in my box, after they’ve left me, I weep unstoppably, lamenting my downfall. Why did they choose me? Of the women caged here, why did I end up as the only one who stinks of sex like a cheap whore? Was it really only because I looked disgusted while they were scoring Trindii? Plenty of other women had done worse, and they didn’t end up being brutally gang raped.

Maybe it was just because I was beautiful enough to score a forty-nine, and they desired me. I can’t help but blame myself, though. A number of the other captives ranked similar to me, and they didn’t just have that horrible grey-haired man stick his penis in their ass. Something I did meant it was me that they chose.

I try to shift into a more comfortable position, and I cry out with pain. Oh, my poor backside. Now I’m alone, there’s nothing to distract my from the protests from my body – my torn vagina and anus; my breasts throbbing from the repeated slapping; my muscles aching from struggling to protect myself. Even my wrists and ankles feel sore from where they pinned me down.

What can I do next? I can’t just kneel here, squashed into this cage, and replay each moment.

The last thing I’d wish for is another cock near me, real or synthetic, but I close my lips over the phallus and suck gently, filling my mouth with the saline-tasting liquid. Shuffling awkwardly in the confined space, I’m then able to bring my hand to my mouth and release the liquid into my cupped palm. Then, I move it down to the place between my legs, and I begin trying to clean myself. The first palm-full isn’t enough. I still feel like I’m caked with the filth. So I suck out another mouthful of liquid And once I’ve begun, I can’t stop. I clean and clean and clean, becoming more frantic, but it does no good.

I smell of sex like a cheap whore, he said, and that was the truth. I don’t want to attract more attention when we dock, and I will do, if I smell like a whore.

My sex and my rear burn with pain when I touch the bruised flesh, but I rub and rub, moaning in panic. It’s crusted to me. It won’t come off. It won’t come off! My very soul is soiled.

“Stop!” a woman’s voice says, gently, from somewhere in the lower row of cages, and when I ignore her she says louder “Stop!” and then, “Stop, alien!” until she breaks through my defenses.

“But I can’t get clean,” I cry.

Dropping my hands to the alloy floor of my cage I resume my weeping. I’m lost. Men took away my clothes and raped me, and now I hurt all over, and they told me I smell of sex like a cheap whore.

“I know how you must be feeling,” she says, gentle again. “We can guess.”

“This can’t be allowed to happen to me,” I plead. “I don’t want to be a slave.”

“I don’t want to be a slave,” another voice agrees.

“I’m a researcher,” the first woman says, then corrects herself. “I was a researcher, I suppose. I studied the psychology of victims of Aghara-Penthay. I promise, you’ll feel better. Rescued women say the first few days in captivity are the worst. Once the implant goes in, the brain can’t help adjust.”

“Is this pep talk meant to make us feel better?” someone asks angrily.

The researcher doesn’t get the chance to reply, which perhaps is lucky. A deep bass boom reverberates through the ship. We’ve just connected to a docking port. Someone wails in terror, and another voice takes up the tune. We have reached The Hub.

5 - Hub

Having the metal collar locked around my throat is humiliating. The alloy chains which link my collar to the collar of girl in front, and the one behind, are humiliating. Being naked in public is more humiliating. But we have no choice. We are on The Hub, a vast orbital station, the territory of Aghara-Penthay, and we are there as women.

A woman is not considered a citizen on Aghara-Penthay territory. Her sex makes her automatically a slave, an object. Objects are not permitted dignity, so no-one here except us will care that we are naked and ashamed.

Thus, we must stumble barefoot along the hard tiles of the floor, most of us half-numb with shock. I’d hoped to conceal my nudity in the crowd of frightened bodies, but we’re made to advance in lines. Lines of naked women, twenty in each one, all linked by the crude collars around our necks.

Across the expanse of The Hub awaits the shuttles that are the only means of access to the planet surface. Offworld males are not permitted on the shuttle craft, or onto the hot desert planet that is the Slaver’s true home. Only citizens, i.e. males of Aghara-Penthay, and female captives may make the journey. No woman undertakes it willingly, for a visit down to the ground seals her doom. Once a woman arrives, she is not permitted to leave until she’s implanted and processed – docile, and under the control of any male that commands her.

We are walking to our doom, and yet we walk anyway, most of us silent, a few weeping. Women that try to delay or to conceal their naked bodies are quickly punished with a touch from the goad. We’re already too familiar with those hateful weapons.

Chained in the third position from the front of my line, I hurry along as best as I can for a woman with terrible internal injuries. I’ve only been goaded briefly, but it was enough even to overcome my other suffering.

Another chain of twenty women – ones with much lower scores - walks parallel to ours. Four more chains, side by side in two-by-two formation are ahead. I can see dozens of my fellow captives. It’s easy to tell the ones who have already been raped from the way we hobble along, as though we’re already ancient. Some of the fallen ones, including me, carry blood streaks or other filth as further evidence of their downfall. I stopped trying to wipe mine away, hoping that the mess might deter further assailants, but the male eyes study me hungrily anyway.

Flanking us are Slavers carrying batons. They are not particularly watchful. It’s already too late for us to run.

The Hub is the gateway between Aghara-Penthay and the rest of the universe. On its lower level are the docking rings, where the Slaver cruisers dock, along with myriad supply vessels, bounty hunters, and the ships ferrying those who seek pleasure. The upper of the three levels is given to administration, and The Hub’s defenses.

It is the middle floor which is notorious. The Mezzanine is a long lurid strip of brothels, bars, restaurants, and hotels where vast profits are made by catering to every sensory desire. The Mezzanine also contains the auction houses where every galactic year, thousands and thousands of processed slaves are sold.

We hear the Mezzanine before we see it. Blaring music. Loud conversation. Men shouting. Raucous laughter, of many males. Interspersed with this, sometimes there is the sound of a female, usually a cry of suffering.

On we stumble. At the front of my chain leads a girl bearing the red mark Forty-Eight on her bare thigh. Behind her, and directly in front of me is Fifty – an exquisitely formed brunette human, with pale skin. I must watch the graceful flexing of her bare buttocks as she walks, and I’m forced to recall once hearing that the shape and tone of a woman’s rear is a signal of her fertility. Then comes my place, and behind me, another Forty-Nine. Two Forty-Sevens, three more Forty-Eights, and on and on.

I’m unable to process the change in my life. Hours ago, I was a free citizen of the Republic. Only feet from me are men who are still free citizens. They are destined to leave The Hub and go back to their lives, when I am destined for sexual slavery. I’ve just been gang raped, and these assholes are here on vacation.

One group of men sit languidly around a table, particularly close to where our unhappy chain passes. They’re watching the chains move past, drinking alcohol as they lap up the view of so much free nude flesh. In any other place you’d take them for clean-cut college boys. But males don’t visit The Hub by accident. Perhaps something about them looks less brutal and more hopeful, for Fifty breaks out of the line and moves towards them, and so, pulled by an uncomfortable tug at my neck, I must follow her.

“Please,” she begs the nearest, a handsome man with neat blond hair and a buff sportsman’s body. He looks the same age as I am.

“Please,” Fifty says again. “Help me. I’ve just been captured. I’m from Illyshkin Four. I’m a citizen of the Republic. Help me, before they take me down there to be implanted. I’ll be your wife, your girlfriend, I’ll be your fantasy. Just save me, before I end up a sex slave.”

“Come closer,” says the blond man.

“My name is Tana,” offers the girl. “Tana Dinovchek.”

I glance anxiously at the nearest Slaver, expecting Tana to be goaded for her audacity, but he’s smiling meanly and is content to watch, at least for now. It’s easy to see why. Things don’t seem to get off to a good start for Tana Dinovchek. She shrieks as she’s seized, and pulled into the man’s lap. There is a sharp drag on my throat, and I must move even nearer.

With the girl in place, the blond man strokes his hand up the back of Tana’s thigh, and over the curve of her naked buttock. He squeezes her breast. Tana looks uncomfortable at such audacity, but she decides to press on with her appeal.

“I was at the Universal Beauty contest, on Iniver Four,” she says. “Lots of us here were there. We’re supposed to become famous models.”

“No shit? I love that show. I’ll watch out for you.”

He pulls at her nipple, and Tana flinches.

“And what do you want from me, hot stuff?” asks the blond man.

“Help me,” she repeats. “Buy me, before I’m taken to the surface. My family are wealthy. You’ll be rewarded by them. And then by me.”

“Well, that’s quite tempting, Tana Dinovchek,” he answers. “But you know what the problem is? I’d rather see you implanted first, and then think about buying you. I know girls like you. You’re too used to getting your way, just because you’re hot. I bet you wouldn’t look at me twice, as soon as we were back on your home world. But here… on Aghara-Penthay, you’re suddenly grateful to have me squeeze your nice juicy tit.”

“Asshole!” says Tana, and she tries to rise, but the blond man tightens his grip.

“Uh-uh,” the guard says to her, finally intervening. “He’s not given you permission to leave. Stay where you are, slavegirl.”

Blond man continues to play with her breast with one hand, while the other he presses between Tana’s bare thighs. She resists for a moment, and says, “stop that!”, but at a frown from the man in uniform, she gives in. Then blond man roughly forces his fingers inside her vulva, and Tana gasps at the discomfort.

“She’s tight,” blond man reports to the guard.

“Fresh catches,” he shrugs. “So new, so fresh off the slave ship, that some of them are still virgins. Need to learn their place.”

“Is that true, bitch? Do you need to learn your place, Tana Dinovchek?” asks the blond man. He withdraws his fingers and reaches up with them to smear her face. Tana flinches, automatically raising her hand to protect herself, and in retaliation he slaps her, slaps her shockingly hard. Before she can do anything, he continues, “Yes, you do need to learn. Probably never had to try and please a man before, huh? Bet you’re used to guys running after you.”

With that he ejects her from his lap, and she stumbles away, tearful, pulling me along behind her, and me pulling the other forty-nine behind me.

“Well, it’s your turn to run. Hurry along and get your implant, cunt!” are his parting words.

After that nasty encounter, none of us try to attract the attention of the men on The Hub. But it’s as though an announcement has gone out. Everyone seems to notice us, and our line is forced to pause frequently.

“Hey, dangles,” a stranger says, stepping in my way. “Nice tits. What’s your name?”

“Coora,” I answer, unable to come up with anything but the truth.

“What are you, Coora? A species from the outer planets?”

“I’m a Dystyr. I’m a citizen of the Republic.”

“Not any more, you’re not. The Republic won’t come and save you here,” he leers. “Can your species have sex with humans?”

“Yes,” I blush, unable to think of an answer other than the truth, “but…”

“A lotta guys have a thing for the alien girls. You’re gonna get pounded raw.”

He says it as though I’ve not thought of that. As though this is all my idea.

“What’s that stuck to your face?” he asks.

Mercifully, I don’t have to answer.

“Keep moving, slaves,” commands one of our guards, and we comply, eager to escape this public beasting.

The lines of women only begin to slow as we approach the far end of the Mezzanine, where the shuttles ferry Slaver male citizens and their captives to and from the surface.

The urge to flee rises in me. Perhaps it’s the horror of what lies on the surface – the implant, the slave mark, and my doom. Perhaps it’s that I’ve not been goaded for a while, and I’m beginning to forget how painful it feels. Perhaps as I’m still young, I’m beginning to recover some of the resilience drained by the gang rape I endured on the ship.

“We have to do something,” I whisper urgently to the women nearest me. “I’m a Republic citizen, studying political theory. I’m meant to go and work for the Republic government.”

“We’re all Republic citizens,” says Tana, the model contestant who was just humiliated by the tourist. “Look where being a free citizen got me. That man…”

“But I can’t be implanted,” I moan, my voice breaking.

“I’m sure the Slavers will be fine about it if you just explain that to them,” says a sarcastic woman’s voice from behind me.

“We could make a break for it,” I suggest, making my voice loud enough to be heard by the other chain of women at our side. “If we all go at once, we might seize some of their weapons, and fight our way to the docking level.”

“We’re stark naked, and we’re chained together by our necks,” a stocky female close by in the parallel line replies angrily. “How far do you think we’d make it? Each one of us they stunned, the rest of us would have to drag her.”

“But we have to do something,” I plead as we get closer and closer to the guarded shuttle bays.

“The something you can do is shut your hole, forty-nine,” the stocky female almost spits at me. “Think you’ve got it bad? You premium bitches will be trained, you’ll get a high-status owner, because only someone like that can afford your perfect bodies. You might end up lying by the pool, when you’re not sucking his dick. Want to swap that for my future? Thirty-one – that’s my number. Sold in a batch to a brothel for lowlifes, and that’s if I’m lucky. So shut up, go get your implant, and smile that vacant smile.”

“You’re bitter because you’re ugly,” I say, shocked by her spite.

“And you’re nothing but an overpampered princess,” she retaliates.

Perhaps I should be grateful to her, for all my terror, my anger, my humiliation, suddenly has a focus. I fling myself at thirty-one, nearly breaking my neck as the chain goes taut when fifty and the forty-nine behind me are dragged along. Not expecting an attack, thirty-one is thrown to the ground, and I’m on her, pummeling, trying to get past her blocking arms and land a good punch on her mean, ugly face.

Voices are shouting, but I’ve forgotten everything around us, so intense is my rage. It takes a moment before I even reconsider my surroundings. I’m lying naked on top of her – more intimately in contact than I’ve been with any other female. Perhaps that’s why the guards let us carry on for a minute. Neither of us is in any danger of doing real harm to the other one, and the sight of two nude women struggling is erotic to them.

I have the advantage of weight, as I’m on top, but Thirty-one knees me repeatedly between the legs, which even for a girl is unpleasant. We’re too close to each other for me to get a punch through her guard, and she can’t do much from on her back except use her knees. When we slow – both of us breathing heavily – I guess we’d have to call it a draw.

I’m looking right down into her face, she’s looking right back, and it’s the first time I feel any closeness between us.

“Up,” orders a guard. “Back on your feet.”

I scramble to obey. The male who commanded me has developed a prominent erection, and I don’t want to be raped yet again.

“Nice show, forty-nine,” he explains, and our lines begin to move again.

Closer and closer we pad towards the docks where we’ll board shuttles, be carried down to the planet’s surface, and be lost forever into our futures of slavery. But there are no more incidents which delay us, and not even a suggestion of attempting to escape. It looks as though I’m going to Aghara-Penthay.

6 - Planetside

Women passengers on the shuttles which descend to the surface of Aghara-Penthay are not given seats. We are packed tightly into the shuttle’s cargo hold, as though we are goods, rather than humans. Hanging from the hold’s ceiling like fronds of a tree are numerous short cables, and each of these is clipped to the collar of a captive, so that we must remain standing in a parade formation, or choke. The women either side of me, and those before and behind, are close enough that we nudge bare bodies each time we are rocked by the movement of the ship.

Thus, naked as part of this shameful formation, we undock, and begin the journey to the next phase of my downfall.

It is almost exclusively the Slavers who can use the seats, which are arranged around the bulkheads boxing in the room. Almost exclusively, for one female captive does sit across the broad thigh of one of the men. This one, an exceptional beauty, is clad, unlike the rest of us. She wears one of the red wraps, the wrap which identifies her as a woman who is property of Aghara-Penthay. Her covering is not much, but it is vastly better than being nude.

Or perhaps not, for her clothing privilege seems to come at a price. The guard’s penis, rampantly hard, has been freed from his pants and points upwards, blatant and obscene, at a forty-five-degree angle. The woman is pulling at it with both her hands, attempting to pleasure him, although even with my limited knowledge I can see she seems inexperienced at the job. Meanwhile his hand is inside her wrap, groping her breast. The man slaps her face, although not as hard as he could. It’s a warning. The female’s face does not carry the slave mark, which is unusual in someone already wearing the wrap.

She seems familiar, although in this horrific context it’s hard to place her. A woman I saw on the transport, perhaps?

“Look, that’s Donaya Oshanka – the news anchor,” one of my fellow nudes gives the answer in a loud whisper.

“How come she gets a wrap?” another captive complains.

“Don’t you know? She must be here for the Rape Run. Runners are the only women who don’t get stripped. They let the audience anticipate seeing them undressed, once they’re caught.”

Donaya, perhaps hearing us, looks in our direction for a moment, fixing us with the intense gaze she’s known for using in interviews. But she bows her head to resume her work, her brunette curls falling forwards to hide her face as she concentrates. Her guard gives a lewd grunt.

“I thought Rape Runners weren’t… you know – interacted with, not before they’re caught in the contest,” whispers another woman, quieter now.

“Who’s she gonna complain to?” someone behind me whispers harshly. “They’re not supposed to mess with any captives until after processing, as the virgins fetch a higher price, but that didn’t stop them using all the ones they liked from the Moons of Odaron. Look at the mess they’ve made of the alien bitch there.”

I realize I’m the ‘alien bitch’ and look down to hide my face, automatically ashamed at the mess still caked on my thighs. Only hours ago, I wasn’t just an alien bitch. My name was Coora. Those who met me saw someone with a high-flying future as a political adviser, serving the Republic on some pleasant planet. I planned to mate with a suitable Dystyr male when it pleased me. Now I’m naked in front of strangers, on my way to Aghara-Penthay to be implanted and ruined. Strangers describe me in terms of being the alien bitch who got herself raped.

Up front, in spite of her inexperience, Donaya brings her captor to climax. The man’s disgusting sperm erupts in a small fountain – some of it landing on Donaya’s hands, and some of it spattering and dribbling down onto himself.

In response to a whispered order she wipes him clean, then grimacing, licks what’s left of the foul mess from her own hands.

That’s when, with a bump, we land.

Gods have mercy on me.

My sob comes without warning, and I’m not the only one who starts crying. The hold’s doors open with a mechanical grinding, and we’re hit by blinding sun and heat like a furnace.

“Out, slave girls,” orders a guard, while his colleagues move along the lines unclipping our collars. No longer linked in chains, weeping women shuffle uncertainly out into the scorching dry air. Gods, it’s hot on this planet. There’s not a cloud breaking the sky, and the sun beats down relentlessly.

The large landing platform where we find ourselves is hundreds of feet above the ground. It overhangs the structure underneath, so I can’t see what supports it. Surrounding us is a plain of oxide-red ground, completely barren. The arid landscape is not uniform – the plain is broken up by formations of rock, and distant mountains of the same uniform color shimmer in the heat haze. I can see something that looks like a city – a vast structure made of many ancient stone buildings merged together into one whole. Perhaps it is designed so the Slavers can move around without being exposed to the outside sun. I scan the panorama and wonder which area is The Zone, the hunting ground where the Slavers chase down Rape Runners like Donaya.

The raiders took such a large haul from the transport that at the end of the Mezzanine we were split across three shuttles. The other two do not land on this pad, and although I see another pad in the city, high on a stone tower, there are no ships on it. I don’t know where they went.

Trindii’s chain happened to be loaded on my shuttle. She looks terrible after a night in a cage with the men. She’s covered in bruises, and she’s limping. One of her lips is swollen and split, as though she’s been punched in the mouth.

All the same, I make for her, desperate for a last bit of comfort from someone who cares for me, before it’s too late. We hug, both of us weeping into each other’s shoulders. I’ve seen her nude before, but not had close physical contact. As we hug, I try not to feel ashamed that our breasts are pressing into each other.

With Trindii is another girl I know from college – Cliria – a willowy blonde human female. Some people you just don’t get on with, try as you might, and Cliria was one of those, for me. No matter how careful I was, she seemed to take things I said the wrong way, so I’d always be on my guard around her. But the Gods have destined us to stand naked together on the surface of Aghara-Penthay. On the course, Cliria seemed to think of herself as quite a catch. The Slavers seemed to agree. A forty-four is inked on the inside of her thigh, close to the vulva.

“You okay?” Trindii asks me, tenderly wiping my tear-streaked face.

“Not really,” is my only true answer. “Men took me to a room on the ship. They… well, you can guess. But you had it worse.”

“Split into groups, snatches!” interrupts the bellow of one of the guards. “Forty-five and over scores – stand there. Forty to forty-five – over by the comms box. The dregs – over there.”

“Good luck. Both of you,” I say to Trindii and Cliria, knowing shortly I’ll probably never see them again.

“Slave luck,” corrects Cliria. She means well, but my tears erupt again.

Slave luck is a phrase which originated here, that’s become well known enough to slip into the galactic vernacular. It seems pointless to wish someone good luck when they’re a sex slave. Their life already proves they’re not destined for good fortune. Slave luck means wishing someone the best outcome possible under horrific circumstances. An easy life with a kind master. Domestic duties instead of sexual service.

“Slave luck,” I think I as I wave Trindii farewell and pad over to the space indicated by the Slaver. We’ve been corralled close to the edge of the pad. There is no barrier between us and the gut-wrenching drop – common practice to avoid ships snagging landing gear. The same thirty-four women taken from the transport assemble in the high scoring area. Among them is Tana, the one with the fifty score taken in the raid.

“Your name is Tana?” I say quietly, not wanting to draw the attention and perhaps punishment of the guard. “I’m Coora.”

“The alien girl, they took away to rape on the ship?” she replies sympathetically.

“That was me,” I shamefully admit.

“I was in the cage next to yours,” she says.

I look hopelessly towards the Slaver settlement, across the void of empty air from our platform.

“We could throw ourselves off this pad…” I say softly. “End it, here.”

But I don’t really have it in me. And neither does she.

“Where there’s life, there’s hope,” says Tana. “Some slaves are rescued. The Republic has a whole sanctuary for them.”

“Follow me, slits!” interrupts one of the guards, and he leads the way into an opening where a flight of stone stairs leads down into a building. Accepting our fate, we pad docilely behind him, naked feet following booted ones. Another couple of Slaver men follow behind, but there is minimal supervision needed now we’re down on the planet’s surface. These new men are administrators, not warriors. For anyone with a vagina instead of a penis, there’s nowhere to run on this world.

Inside, it is like stepping from the modern to ancient galaxy. I’m padding down roughly hewn stone steps, that resemble the interior of a castle, rather than anything from my era. Only the bioluminescent lighting, or the occasional blink of comms or sensor panels, reveal the presence of tech.

At first there are windows – narrow slits without glass, as the protection from the climate is unnecessary on this world. But we work our way down and further into the building, and everything from then on is under artificial light. After several minutes we pause, in a wide hallway.

A guard with a badge of rank addresses us.

“Slits,” he says, “you are the lucky ones. Your beauty is all that defines you, as a female on Aghara-Penthay. Beautiful women like you have higher value. Training will increase that value further. Shortly, you will be taken to a pen used for holding slaves during their training. Work hard at your training, or you will be punished.”

“But first, a medical scan,” he barks. “You will be sent in twos, through this door and along the corridor to a room. Put your head into one of the boxes you see embedded into the wall. You’ll be scanned for disease and parasites from your inferior worlds, infections which may threaten the security of Aghara-Penthay, and your brain outputs will be read for sexual tendencies. After the scan, proceed out the far door towards the processing room. Do you understand?”

My stomach rolls with nerves. “Processing”. That means the implant, the mark. Processing is the end of my life as a Republic female. An implant chip will be injected into the brainstem. After that, I’ll be submissive to men forever. Even if I’m one on the rare few who are rescued, I could never resume anything like a normal life. A loser like Jurong would just have to ask me to sleep with him, and I’d comply. Jurong would love that - seeing me reduced to an obedient and receptive slave. I pray our paths never cross again.

“First two cunts,” says the Slaver, bringing me back to the present, “you, and you.”

The two women he indicated, both creatures with their beauty marred by their expressions of terror, proceed apprehensively through the door. I try to see inside, but only glimpse another corridor. For several minutes we just stand there. Tana has bunched so close to me that she’s brushing against me. I think she just wants contact with another female.

Then there’s a squark from a comm link, and the Slaver directs the next two women through the doorway. One of this next pair has just wet herself from fear, and her legs glisten with her own urine.

We draw back away from the puddle.

“I’ll make you lick that up, afterwards,” the Slaver calls after the departing woman.

Again we stand, each remaining female growing more and more frightened as our numbers reduce. A scan, and then processing. By the end of this day, the worst day of my life, I’ll be implanted, and forever a sex slave. I would do anything to delay what’s about to happen, but my moment has come.

“You next, dangles,” says the officer, indicating me, “you and your sexy friend, through the door.”

Tana and I move as directed. We look back towards those still waiting for a second, as the door closes behind us. But then we’re in a bare stone corridor, and our only option is forwards.

“I can’t be implanted,” I whisper to Tara. “So as soon as the scan is over, if there’s somewhere to run – we run. I don’t care if they shoot me. I should have jumped from the platform.”

“Agreed,” she replies. It didn’t take long to give up on the “where there’s life, there’s hope”, then.

A heavy alloy blast door is at the far end of our corridor. Pushing our way apprehensively through, we find ourselves in a chamber that’s almost empty save for the tech. One wall is not stone, but contains banks of the boxes, and display screens.

A Slaver male waits here – someone of lower rank than the one who directed us. Still, he is a male, and therefore free, which makes him much better than us. He is clothed, and has a chair and a blaster. We stand nude. A pad at his side is playing a vid. He is bored.

The boxes we were told about are obvious. They’re at chest height, side by side in a row, and have a large oval opening, big enough to fit even a skull like mine, with its scorns of flesh. It’s completely black inside them, as though they’re part of a magician’s trick to produce flowers or a pet out of nothing.

“Heads inside the scanners, cunts,” the guard says lazily. This lowlife is so unconcerned he’s half slumped in his seat. I guess even sex Slavers can have repetitive jobs.

Fearfully, I half bend forward and insert my head into the dark opening, as Tara does the same alongside me. My bare rump is left pointing out behind me.

“Get right in there, bitches, right in, until you feel the far side press on the top of your heads,” the male calls languidly.

I comply. There’s a square of padded alloy pressing against my crown. What will the scan feel like? Lights, sounds? I wonder how they can build data on me, without yet possessing any of my personal details.

I’ve considered myself to be intelligent – I’m a woman at an elite college, but by the time I realize I’ve been tricked it’s too late.

Something mechanical seizes my skull in a grip like a vice, seeming to press in on me from all directions at once with irresistible force. Before my scream has even begun, I feel a pain like I’ve never felt in my life – a piecing, at the back of my head, as though someone has shoved a needle from the top of my spine through to my eyes. Simultaneously, there’s a white-hot burning at my cheekbone – torture flaring as hot as the touch of the slave goad.

My cry of agony is deafening in the confined space. I think I hear Tara howl beside me from the same suffering, but I’m not sure.

And then the pain is fading, and the vice’s hold begins to relax its grip. In a panic I try to withdraw too soon, and painfully scrape my head against the retreating clamps.

Tana’s expression shows a silent scream of unimaginable horror. Where moments earlier there was only the smooth pale skin of her cheekbone, she now carries a swirling dark mark – a mark recognized across the galaxy. The mark of a slave woman of Aghara-Penthay – someone processed and implanted.

She raises one hand tentatively and presses her fingertips behind her skull, at the top of her spine. I mirror her action. I can feel a lump that wasn’t there before. Swelling around the injection site. That’s where it went in - my implant.

“You two look upset,” says the guard, unconcerned. “So kiss, to comfort each other.”

I could really use a sign of tenderness from another living being. Tara must be feeling the same, for she and I move close. “I’m sorry,” I say, and holding her freshly marked face with infinite gentleness, I draw her towards me. Her lips are warm and soft, and they taste of tears.

“That’s enough,” says the guard. “Now go through there, and wait.”

We’re already implanted, lost. There’s no point resisting him now, so we silently follow the orders and shuffle out.

“Next ones, boss,” the guard is already saying into his comm as we leave.

In the room beyond, the females who went ahead of us are waiting. All of them similarly damned with the slave mark, the mark that means they carry the implant.

I will have one of those on my face, too. Every man in the universe who hasn’t been hiding under a rock will see it, and know what it means. I am broken. I have no ability to resist their commands. I will be their sex slave. Again, instinctively I fold an arm across my chest, and use my other hand to cover my sex. As though that will protect me.

A couple of the women are weeping. I feel close to crying again myself.

I press my fingers again on the lump. How long do I have before it works? How long before I lose my free will?

“It’s not fair,” one of the newly-marked women moans. “They said processing would be in the next room. We weren’t given a chance.”

Have the other women captured from the transport already been implanted, just like us? Trindii? Cliria? Thirty-nine? So many of us…

Cliria wished me slave luck. The guard on the landing platform said we were the lucky ones. It doesn’t feel like I’m lucky, so far.



7 - Pens

If I was to choose the person I hate most in the universe, someone who didn’t know me will might expect I’d have gone for the men who gang raped me on the transport, or Jurong, who tried to violate me during the pirate raid, believing he’d be safe because I’d be seized, and wouldn’t have chance to report him. But no - it’s Trygg, our slave trainer.

Trygg is the male with responsibility for maximizing our value before we’re delivered for auction.

On Aghara-Penthay, Slaver society is divided into factions – four tribal groups under a chief, or faction leader. The transport carrying me, and the unlucky others, was raided by pirates from the faction of Jackran-ad-aktar – known across the universe as “The Alien”. Trygg works for him. So do all the men who live in this particular Slaver settlement. On the arm of Trygg’s soiled uniform is a badge, bearing Jackran-ad-aktar’s livery.

Before being captured, I’d hoped for a rewarding career in the service of the Republic, travelling in a series of postings to liaise with the governments of pleasant, civilized, planets. I’d studied hard, learning about political theory; sociology, history; math.

None of these skills are useful in a sex slave. All that matters is the skills relating to pleasing men, and making myself as arousing as possible to them.

Under Trygg, sometimes literally under him, is a female – Alurri. She is a rare thing – a slave who resides permanently on Aghara-Penthay. Alurri’s responsibility is to teach us all the things which we need to understand for our new lives. In exhaustingly long days, we learn how a sex slave serves food and drink; how to walk and move; slave poses, and rituals for how to present ourselves; how to wash a male; how to dance – not the cultural movement forms like I learnt in girlhood, but obscenely erotic styles of choreography. We discover how a woman should act while in restraints.

Then there is the sex theory. I find out more information about the penis than I could have believed existed. There are also other pleasure spots on the male body, and I must memorize them all. I learn the places on a woman’s body – other than her obvious holes – where she can also bring a man to climax. By squeezing the penis between the breasts, for example.

Some men like to see woman with woman, or enjoy watching a woman in heat, so I am instructed by Alurri how to arouse myself, and other member of my own sex.

Most insidious are the lessons in slave psychology. I’d believed that the implant was all that was needed to break a captive, but no. For hours at a time on my knees, repeating mantras that men are superior to me; that sexual slavery is the only place for females; that I exist only to please men; that my body is all that matters about me. These are crude techniques, but it’s hard not to start to believe it when it’s hammered in so relentlessly.

When Trygg and two of his underlings first brought Alurri naked into our pen, I thought she was another unlucky captive being prepared for sale. For the three men came in armed with goads, and without explanation they goaded her, and goaded her and goaded her with those hateful batons that stimulate the body’s pain receptors. For a full five minutes, we were ordered to watch without looking away, and to listen to her screams, and to picture ourselves in her place.

When it finished, and Alurri was left gasping and weeping on the floor, we found out the reason for the demonstration. Alurri was to train us, Trygg said. She would shortly be given her own goad, to help motivate the females in our pen, and to help teach us to truly fear those in authority. Any time when our progress did not sufficiently please Trygg, or if Trygg considered that Alurri wasn’t brutalizing us enough, the goading we’d witnessed would be repeated on Alurri.

Sure enough, Alurri was handed one of those hateful weapons which had just been used on her own body, she was privileged with being handed a slave wrap, to emphasize her superior status over us, and she was left to begin. It quickly became clear that Alurri had no intention of enduring that torture a second time, and we have been paying the price ever since.

I hate Trygg above all beings in the universe, but the one I fear the most is Alurri.

I will do absolutely anything to please that female, and all my endeavors are focused on earning her brief nod of approval.

But my all is still not enough. She is not just imparting skills – she was ordered to teach us fear, and she does. Most of the punishment we receive results from a minor slip or transgression in the day’s exercise, but sometimes we’re goaded in order to teach us a slave can be goaded without a reason. Just because the one with power wishes it so. There are those out there who find it arousing to cause pain to others, and many like to see females suffering. One such is Trygg. Sometimes he orders a slave to be tortured merely for his pleasure, and we are made to watch along with him.

There is nothing I can do to escape this horror. We soon discover that the control of our implants over us is absolute. If one of the Slavers orders us to endure some fresh torment, we run to them, docile and inert, ready for it to begin. We are ordered not to flee, so we don’t. Besides, where is there to flee, anyway? Slave implants can be tracked. Anywhere across the galaxy, my owners will now be able to follow me. There is no escape, unless incredibly good fortune places me at one of the few sanctuaries, where implanted women rescued by the Republic are guarded from their own compulsions.

My implant is linked to a record they created of my personal and private information. Not just my name, species, history. All my sexual history and preferences are recorded there. In the most humiliating interview of my life, Trygg probed me for every detail, beginning from the earliest fumblings and experiments in my girlhood. I didn’t want to discuss such matters, but I found myself answering truthfully anyway as soon as he commanded me. They like to rape our minds, as well as our bodies. Trygg discovers I particularly dislike anal penetration, so those who wish to use me are made aware of this fact. Trygg learns that the Dystyr are conservative and shy, and I find it particularly humiliating to show my sexuality in front of others. Next day as a result, I am ordered to arouse myself in front of the group, and then I am raped, while under compulsion to climax during my own violation.

My presentation of the training up to now has sounded mostly theoretical, but there are most definitely practical elements too. With the exception of the few virgins, our captors may use us at will, and they do. Trygg especially so. Girlfriends in the Republic had told me that human males could only climax a few times a day, but that man’s appetite for women seems insatiable.

Always he hangs around the training room, watching lazily, or goading either one of us, or Alurri, seemingly at random, until he becomes sufficiently worked up to wish to sate his lust. Then a victim is chosen and raped, usually by means of her least favorite manner, either in front of the group, or after removal to his room. There are several underling males reporting to Trygg, even though they have no obvious roles from what I’ve seen, other than to intimidate then rape women. These brutes make equally free with us.

Those girls who admitted in their interviews to being virgins are spared the vaginal penetration, as virginity is going to add to a woman’s sale value to many cultures, and for slave traders it’s all about the credits. But apparently a woman can remain a virgin while taking it in the ass or the mouth, so I’m not sure if the virgins are to be envied or pitied compared to the rest of us.

Our pens have no windows, so we soon lose track of time in our world of perpetual artificial light. There is a period when these lights are extinguished and we are ordered to rest. Those hours we call ‘night’, but it could be any time outside on the planet’s surface. The relentless sexualization of us does not cease with the darkness. Most often we sleep in the pens, but sometimes we are summoned to share a man’s bed. Serving as an overnight companion is a duty commonly expected of a sex slave.

Even at night in the pens, our time is not our own. On the first day, each of us was paired with another female. My double is Tana – one of the virgins, at least she’s a virgin except for the cruel male who fingered her insides on the Hub.

With our companion, we must sleep intimately close - squashed naked together into a cage with proportions resembling a large coffin. Any attempts at privacy or dignity were soon surrendered during the exhaustion of the first night, and from then on, we’ve slept entwined in whatever position gives most comfort.

The Slavers force us to form an emotional bond with our companions, that our feelings might then be used to torment us. Firstly, every night we must finger our companion, taking pleasure from each other until we orgasm. The noises from our pens, in the first hours of darkness, are quite obscene. I naively hoped to act this role at first, but found that thanks to my implant, my body moved under command as though without my volition. I can hold back my climax as easily as I could hold back the tides on my homeworld.

Secondly, we must share in our successes and failures. Often when one of us is goaded, both of us are goaded. Or sometimes, when Tana performs below expectation I am punished, or vice versa. The mind games are as insidious as the mantras. When she’s in pain, I learn to hate it. She’s just another sex slave, but her wellbeing matters to me.

As our climaxes fade each night, we often end up weeping, kissing, doing anything we can to briefly sooth each other’s mutual misery.

As the days of training roll on, our progress is assessed by each slave being forced to spend a night in a coffin cage pleasing Alurri. When my turn comes, I believe I bring my instructor to climax quickly, but next day I learn I wasn’t sufficiently seductive when Tana is punished with a whipping in front of the group.

Coora is cold – that is what everyone in our group is told. Coora thinks she is better than human women. You must teach Coora that this is not the case. That is an order.

Just before we are caged for the night, the human women administer my lesson. With faces apologetic but implacable, I’m given the beating of my life – kicked and punched by every single woman, driven by her implant. Even Tana joins in.

I don’t need a lesson from the other women to make me hate myself. I already hate myself for failing. I hate myself for being a sex slave. I hate this life. I hate being female. I should have thrown myself from the landing platform when I had the chance, but my implant prevents even that final choice. I believe that I’m so pathetic that I deserve to be a slave to men.

In this place of endless misery, we forget all about the past, and do not think of the future. We only exist now, trying to deliver whatever task is currently required to a level of perfection which might just avoid punishment. I forget Trindii, Jurong, thirty-nine, my friends at the university, my friends and family back on the Dystyr homeworld. I forget that there are many places across the universe where women are free. I chant my mantras – it is correct that I am a sex slave.

I even forget that our time in training has a purpose, and the Slavers never meant it to be permanent. On the night that turns out to be our last in the pens, I happen to be in my cage alone, for Trygg choses Tana to fill his bed. She returns, weeping and limping from her damaged backside, while I’m with the other women, preparing to practice my skills for the day. But Trygg and his men are not far behind Tana.

“Follow us, slaves,” Trygg orders, and so strong now is the compulsion of my implant that already it’s as though someone is pulling at my heart. “All except you,” and he indicates Alurri.

Tana and I look at each other anxiously, and we bunch close together to try and give comfort, but we all know this means new horrors are ahead. We know that the girls around us offer no protection against our fate, but we huddle together anyway.

It never rains on Aghara-Penthay, and except for the rare sandstorms, the climate is perpetually baked by the nearby star. And yet as we follow Trygg to the landing pad – the same pad where we arrived without implants as fresh captives, I pass the first empty window space and I realize it must have been weeks since I’ve seen sunlight.

8 - Sale

This time, the number they have given me is not a score. It is my lot number.

Forty women are packed into this slave pen, each labeled between one and forty, and each with our number displayed on a wrist strap much like a watch, so bidders may match what they see with whatever other information has been provided. Forty women - humans, aliens, different skin colors and body shapes, forty women who once had lives, loves and families, but each one now implanted and marked, each one naked. I am lot thirty-four. Just one of these forty women.

We are back on the Hub in orbit around the Slaver planet. From here, the Slaver raiding vessels dock with fresh captives, and transport ships ferry visitors to and from the rest of the universe. The transport ships that represent freedom and escape are so close I could walk to them in a matter of minutes, but they might as well be on the other side of the galaxy as far as I’m concerned. Men are everywhere on the Hub, and as soon as I heard one lewd request from a man, all progress towards a better life would end as I’d hurry to obey him. And that fate would only occur if we could even escape the auction center. The door to our pen has been kept locked since we arrived. This is the Hub. Men are close who are not of men Aghara-Penthay, and that means that here, the stealing of slave girls is a danger. The Slaver guards who did little more than rape us down on the planet, now take their responsibilities seriously.

We have been tightly cramped into this space, which is no more than a holding cell, for some time. There is nothing in here except for a hole in one corner to use if we need to relieve ourselves, and a feeding tube in the bulkhead. There is not even enough space for us all to sit at once, let alone rest. If a woman wishes to lie down, it requires the cooperation of her neighbors. An exhausted female who was taken from the training pen last night, and violated relentlessly by the guards, makes use of the least popular space, lying with her head near the filth hole.

I’ve lost track of time, as to how long we’ve been in here, but surely it is at least eight hours. Most of us wait stoically, but a few weep. A few try to arouse themselves, so their flushed cheeks and erect nipples will increase their desirability. A few pray. Tana is one of those.

“Please, Gods, a kind master, who takes me from here and treats me well. Please, Gods, a kind master.”

They have given her number thirty-nine – like the mark written on my aggressor’s thigh on the journey down to the surface. For the auction, I do not know if a high number is better or worse, but it matters not. I will be sold as thirty-four. She will be thirty-nine.

The Dystyr are not a spiritual people. “Slave luck” is the best I can expect.

Without warning, the door opens with a pneumatic whoosh, and many of us jump.

“Number one!” says the Slaver official, an older, overweight male wearing the uniform of the Jackran-ad-aktar faction. “Come with us.”

Under the compulsion of her implant, number one silently leaves with the Slaver, and the door seals us inside once more. Silently I count Carraleppis – the way Dystyr teach their young to estimate seconds. One Carraleppi, Two Carraleppi – it gives me something to focus on, other than my fears.

I do not know the vendor’s name – even though he will change my whole life by selling me, selling me as though I’m a piece of merchandise and not a sentient being. I have not learnt number one’s name either. I suppose I never will.

I would estimate that ten more minutes elapse before the Slaver returns for the female who is lot number two. I do not know her name, either. Number two sells in perhaps five minutes. Number three takes a little longer. Once I studied math, and I estimate that at this pace, it will be several hours before my turn comes.

Gradually, the numbers of women in the cell dwindle. We look at each other nervously. If there was some way to better prepare, to influence the outcome towards the best owner, of course we would do it, but the power is all with the men who will be buying and selling. We are not even permitted knowledge of the selling process, where we might make ready.

I use the feeding tube. I urinate in the hole. Once there’s more space I lie on the floor for a while, but it’s rock hard, and I’m too wired to rest.

Female number twenty-five is the first to break, and starts sobbing uncontrollably as she’s taken from the cell. The guards are not pleased. Crying women do not show their faces to best advantage. It takes fifteen minutes before they come for twenty-six. I suspect they’re forced to calm twenty-five down before she can go to her auction.

Female number thirty is taken. There’s only ten of us remaining in the room now. My stomach has become upset from the fear, and I must relieve myself from the other orifice, and then attempt a rudimentary clean. Female number thirty-one is called. Female thirty-two. Gods, help me, it’s nearly me. I don’t believe in you Gods, but if anyone has mercy, please, a kind master.

They come for lot thirty-three. I’m so afraid, I’m feeling nauseous. Time slows to a crawl. How long has it been? One minute? Five minutes?

Tana approaches, and squeezes my hand. She doesn’t speak – there is nothing can be said.

After a short eternity, the door is opened.

“Lot thirty-four,” the Slaver official says gruffly. “Come with us.”

There is no refusing a direct command. Trembling, I pad out after him into the corridor. Perhaps I do not pad quickly enough, for the Slaver grabs my upper arm painfully, pulling me along with him. We only have a short journey to the auction room – already I hear the sounds of many male voices – rowdy and intimidating - growing quickly louder as we get close to the chamber. As we hurry towards my sale, the Slaver gives me orders.

“You must walk up and down the catwalk, and follow the auctioneer’s instructions, until your sale is complete,” he says. “Move beautifully, in the way you’ve been taught. Keep your head up, so the buyers might see your face, but keep your eyes down. You are forbidden from speaking, unless you are instructed to do so.”

Then we’re at the door, leading into a large hall where, in front of me, steps lead up to the side of a stage.

“Up there,” the Slaver orders, and I must obey him, even though “up there” means I must step naked onto a stage, displayed in front of a room full of people.

I wish I could curl into a ball to hide myself, and then die from shame. The vast majority of the raucous crowd filling the seats are men, men who can see me naked, although I see a few women clad in the dark blue slave wraps, which indicate a female privately owned. I see that every pair of eyes are on me, until I remember my orders and quickly lower my gaze submissively down.

At the far side of the stage, a man, the auctioneer I assume, stands behind a lectern. A Slaver guard, unshaven, also stands at the back of the stage, armed with a goad. From the middle of the stage, the catwalk extends out between the rows of seats. I must pass very close to the chairs – I will be inches from all these men.

But the compulsion from my implant is everything. I begin to walk down the catwalk, stepping gracefully in a way which accents the movement of my hips. There is a cheer from the crowd as I sashay along, accompanied with much taunting. I hear comments and abuse shouted from all directions, almost all of it about my physical appearance. My hands, at my sides, are trembling as I continue up the narrow runway, trying not to burst into tears.

“Gentlemen, we present lot thirty-four,” begins the auctioneer. ““Coora” is a particularly fine example of females from the Dystyr species. As you can see, she has delightfully toned legs and buttocks, and her breasts are, as you can see, literally, outstanding.”

There are cheers of agreement to this witticism. “Hey, bangers!” a vulgar voice calls, trying to attract my attention.

“The long tubes of flesh coming from her head are known as ‘scorns’”, continues the auctioneer. “They become sensitive during arousal, and may also be used for restraint.”

Tie me up by my scorns? Who would want to do that?

I hear a loud chiming noise coming from some tech in the auctioneer’s lectern. Then, a moment after, a second chime.

“Coora is twenty-two years of age, by the galactic reckoning. Her lucky owner will have many years to enjoy her prime.”

At the end of the catwalk, I turn on the ball of my foot, and proceed steadily back to the stage. Those behind me will be able to see how my bare buttocks move when I walk.

“Dystyr females usually save themselves until breeding, so we were surprised that Coora had already pleasured multiple men by the time she arrived at The Hub,” continues the auctioneer.

Anger flares in me. Bastards. These Slavers are utter bastards. Now the tears are close. I’d only “pleasured multiple men” because I’d been gang raped on their ship. But they’re making me sound like some kind of cheap whore. What if Dystyr are bidding on me? What if someone I know sees this?

“We have perfected that sensuous nature, and completed Coora’s sexual training. She is highly skilled at bringing an owner to orgasm, using whichever of her holes he pleases.”

There is a rapid succession of chimes from the lectern, and with horror I begin to understand their purpose. Those chimes indicate bids. Bids on my life. I’d assumed the bidders might be in the hall, calling out their offers, but of course most interested parties will be watching the sales remotely. So these men in the hall are..? And I understand that too. They’re men of the galaxy on a vacation to the Hub, and they’re just here watching for entertainment. I’m a living, sentient woman, being sold into sex slavery, but for these men, looking at my body is nothing but a thrill. My naked humiliation is something pleasurable to watch.

“Coora’s implant is guaranteed fully functional. She has been instructed by the finest slave trainers, in all the arts of service which man demands of woman.”

I’ve turned to move back out along the catwalk, so I’m unaware of a Slaver guard approaching behind me until he seizes one of my scorns, grabbing it close in beside its root in my skull.

“Bend forward,” he orders me, putting pressure on the scorn until I double far enough over at my waist. In this position, I’m rotated round with my ass sticking out behind me, showing off my body in an obscene view.

“Now, upright,” is all he would need to command before I’m standing ruler-straight. But he drags me up by the scorn anyway, pulling painfully to arch my back and present me to the audience. Then he grabs one of my breasts and squeezes it hard enough to make me wince, while the crowd cheer at my misery.

Something about this display triggers a flurry of chiming bids, and I think things couldn’t get worse, but I’m wrong.

“Look right at my chin,” he orders. An odd command, but I focus on his stubbled jaw anyway, which is only inches from my face, as though we’re lovers about to kiss. Because I’m looking at his jaw, I miss him slipping the goad between my legs and pressing the wand against my core. The goad is on the pleasure setting, instead of pain, but the effect is just as paralyzing. My body locks rigid as thousands upon thousands of nerve endings in my womanhood electrify me with stimulation. The cry I emit could never be mistaken for anything but arousal. Between my legs, I am flooded with the fire of desire.

The contact is gone as suddenly as it arrived, and he releases his grip on my flesh, but the damage has been done. The crowd goes wild as I stand frozen with horror. We all know what they’ve witnessed. I’ve shown them I am woman, sexual, sensuous.

“As you can see, Coora’s body is exceptionally responsive,” says the auctioneer over the rush of accompanying chimes. “The Dystyr are a peaceful species, and we’ll also show you she has a low tolerance for pain.”

I look round in alarm, but not quickly enough. The goad brushes my flank, dialed to the pain setting this time, and with muscles locked by the agonizing jolt I’m flung to the catwalk floor. I’ve already been sexually humiliated, was that not enough? My side still burns with the aftermath of the wand, and I can’t hold the crying back any longer. In front of the crowd, I burst into tears.

This provokes another rush of bids. Is there any male out there who doesn’t enjoy watching women suffer?

“On your feet!” barks the guard. “Keep walking.”

I’m terrified I’m about to be goaded some more, and I rush to stand, but the torture is over. He’s already returning to his place at the back of the stage. Has he done this for all the women before me? Will he do it for the ones after? For Tana?

Crying might detract from my beauty, but I’ve lost my ability to restrain it, and I weep openly as I continue to parade up and down. The pace of the chimes is slowing, and the interest of the crowd seems to be diminishing too.

“The last chance to buy this fine piece of cunt is going…” says the auctioneer, when there’s about ten seconds without a bid. But still there is no more.

“Sold!” he exclaims to the room, and to me: “Through that door, slave!”

Numb with shock, I hurry to the stairs at the other side of the stage from where I came in. I’m eager to be out of the sight of these monsters. The Slaver official, who has been watching from the entry portal, has already gone to fetch slave thirty-five.

The place I find myself inside is like a large loading dock for logistics, except it’s one that smells of sweat and urine and fear. Neatly arranged across the floor are rows of crates on wheels. They remind me of oversized pet carriers, being equipped with a cage door and air holes around the sides. An adult female would be able to fit inside one of them, if she crouched down and drew up her knees inside. From within some of these crates, I can hear women crying.

Two low-ranking Slaver guards have been watching the sale, and are waiting here to receive me.

“Follow us,” one of the men says, and as I docilely pad behind them, I’m led to one of the crates. Like the others, there is a tech pad on the side, probably to carry my sale and shipping information. “Lot 34”, it says on it.

“Inside!” he snaps.

I crouch down and crawl, undignified, into the box. There’s a dispenser for fluid inside here, but nothing else. The floor is hard and uncomfortable. I find there’s enough space to turn round with difficulty, but there’s not enough room to stand or straighten my legs. While I adjust myself, and vainly try to find a comfortable position, the Slavers slam the door shut. I hear the magnetic lock trap me inside.

The three solid sides of my crate allow a little privacy, and comparatively alone I surrender myself to the tears again. That was one of the worst experiences of my life – nearly as bad as the gang rape on the ship.

I’ve just been sold, as though I’m a thing. Me – Coora of the Dystyr, meant to be studying Politics then going to work in the Republic, before eventually returning to my home world to choose a mate. I have just been paraded naked, and sold as a sex slave. A “fine piece of cunt”, that’s what they called me. Gods help me, who owns me? I don’t even know. I’d at least expected a “sold to…” from the auctioneer, but do my feelings not even deserve that?

“You deal with thirty-five when she comes in,” one of the guards says to the other, interrupting my thoughts. The men are still close by, but I can’t see them out of my cage door. “I want to go watch thirty-six.”

“What is it with you and the ones with no tits?” his comrade replies.

“The heart wants what the heart wants,” he shrugs.

I stare at the walls of my container, my whole being filled with hate for these people. How long will I be in here? But we are not to wait hours in this room, like we did before the auction. Every minute, low ranking Slavers wheel out another crate, presumably taking them to the docking level of the Hub, for loading onto a delivery vessel. Several crates have already gone by the time thirty-five, crying even more than I did, is brought into the room. For some reason I feel a little hope. I am an implanted slave, and when my new owner orders me to remain in his sexual service, I will certainly do so. And yet, slavery on his world has to be better than on Aghara-Penthay.

“Slave luck,” I plead silently.

They come for my crate quickly. I don’t even witness Tana emerging from her auction. My heart pounds as, pushed by two Slavers, my crate abruptly starts rumbling along the floor of the Hub. The docking level, I’m anticipating, and then, thank the Gods, I’ll be off Slaver territory.

But Coora of the Dystyr does not have slave luck. We move a maximum of a hundred yards, before the crate stops, and someone opens the magnetic lock of my cage door.

“Out!” a male voice snaps at me.

I have arrived at the Flower Garden.

9 - Flower

“Now you, you’re something special,” the man says to me. “How much to fuck you?”

“One hundred credits, Master,” I reply promptly. “Just ask inside, and they’ll let me out of this cage.”

“Is it more if I want to do you in the ass?”

“No, Master. It’s only more expensive if you want to harm me, or leave marks. That takes me out of circulation while I heal, which costs the house money.”

“Excellent. Get yourself wet. I’ll be back for you in a minute.”

I finger my core, circling the spots which I know awaken my desire, readying myself for yet another partner. Dystyr women typically only mate with one or two different dominant males in their entire lives. An alpha male is at his peak for five to ten years, so a woman will bear a number of offspring for her chosen over that period, perhaps move on to mate with a second alpha, and then spend her declining years raising young. Our society is formed of large extended families, all under one patriarch. I have four full siblings, and dozens of half-siblings.

At the Flower Garden, I am not to be permitted only one mate. I am not to be permitted only two mates, or even three. It is not unusual for me to have sex with twenty different strangers in one day. The next day, there will be a similar number of new faces. The next day, same again.

The Flower Garden is one of the Hub’s many brothels. The more exclusive brothels, such as this one, usually market themselves as specializing in meeting one particular taste. The Palace of Roses, for example, caters for those who enjoy inflicting pain on women. The Treasure House aims to offer the most exquisitely attractive females. The Flower Garden satisfies those who desire non-human women.

Sixteen of us serve here as sex slaves. Seven Gaianesians – women who appear almost human save for a distinctive marking on their foreheads, and a reflex that renders them defenseless and sexually receptive. Two shapeshifters, who can resemble any female the customers choose. A mix of various nonhumans of all species, colors, and traits, make up the rest. There were two Dystyr, but one was killed by a customer a few months ago. That kind of incident happens regularly here. The brothel’s manager, Jabal, went to the auctions for a replacement, and he found me.

It costs men one hundred credits if they want to have sex with me. I do all of the work, but of the earnings, I keep zero. An average of twenty men per day – that’s two thousand credits a day, from each slave. It’s not surprising that the brothels on the Hub are very lucrative, and can afford to use their profit to buy the highest quality slaves.

The Hub never sleeps, and outsiders on pleasure trips arrive here at all hours. So we work in shifts – sixteen hours on duty, eight hours to rest. I see the other Dystyr female – Illonya – during the overlap of our hours. Being of the same species we’re naturally drawn together, by shared understanding of the experience and the disgrace suffered by a captive Dystyr woman.

Competition between the brothels is fierce, so during our hours in service, we are displayed prominently to attract customers. The front of our establishment, open to the Hub’s Mezzanine level, comprises a row of vertical cages, much like an upright coffin in their proportions, marking the boundary of the venue. We must stand in these cages for hours at a time, nude. A session in the cages starts off being reasonably bearable, but become terribly uncomfortable, with the alloy bars permitting no resting position for tired legs. Furthermore, it’s difficult to reposition our arms quickly in the confined space, and that makes us very vulnerable. The gangs of marauding males on their vacation trips like to tease us, pinching and prodding, and enjoying a free grope of a woman’s defenseless body, until Jabal gets annoyed with our wailing and tells them they must pay, or leave.

But we all prefer the serving in the cages to the final part of the boundary – the wall. A high wooden structure, it is configured with hinged openings, located at the height of an adult female’s waist. One opening is cut to fit the torso, and two are just large enough for a woman’s wrists. Leaning forward, one of us is locked into this wall for every shift, her body bisected by the woodwork, her arms trapped at her sides. The woodwork prevents the victim seeing anything of their lower body, and with the position pushing their rear out behind them, whoever is in the wall feels horribly vulnerable.

On my first time in there, a man raped me, and I never even saw his face. I don’t know if he paid. His fingers were there first, without warning, and then his penis was inside me. The wall blocks the view from staff in the brothel of our upper bodies, so in the wall we’re even more vulnerable than in the cages. It’s rare to make it through a shift without some drunken imbecile rushing up, and laughing just like his actions are all some college prank, he will jerk off over the unlucky girl’s face. One day without warning a stranger struck me hard enough to knock me out, and I woke up in the back room being healed.

So when someone wants to rape me back in one of the private rooms, it’s almost a relief.

The session of anal sex with the man who said I was something special is quite brief, and thirty minutes later he’s down a hundred credits, and I’m standing back in the cage with a sore backside.

A Dystyr male approaches my cage next, but he decides he prefers Illonya, who is the hapless female in the wall today. Taking the woman while still in the wall is cheaper, as the house is saved the time of moving her to and from the private rooms. Perhaps this male is on a budget.

To my shame, I’m relieved when he chooses her instead of me.

A downside of Dystyr society is that the beta males, those who are not genetically strong enough to gather a group of women, still harbor the fantasies of having sex with a Dystyr female. On our homeworld there are some prostitutes who provide this experience, but some males prefer to travel offworld and pay to force themselves on a Dystyr slave.

It is considered a disgrace in our society for a woman to mate with an inferior male – she demeans herself, genetically speaking. Most societies look down on prostitutes, but it’s particularly the case with Dystyr women who sell sex, so it is not the finest examples of our womanhood who seek the profession. Still, they are better than me. I find the shame of my status unbearable each time that one of my own kind arrives at the Flower Garden.

“Where is Coora? We saw her on the networks. How much for Coora?”

Dystyr males want inside my head, and I’m compelled by the implant to answer their questions. Who are your family? Do they know you’re a sex slave? What is it like fucking us? What arouses you? Tell me about your past.

I usually prefer sex with the human males, for at least there, there is less social stigma, but the next human male who wants me is more humiliating than usual, for he already has a female with him. She wears the much-envied blue wrap and ankle bracelet, that identifies her as a private slave. These are women who are not under the authority of Aghara-Penthay.

It is not unheard of for free women to desire to visit the Hub. They might do it to please their partner, or they might hold a secret submissive nature, and yearn to experience slavery briefly, before returning to their normal lives. The wrap of a private slave hides as little as the red wrap, and some enjoy being the object of so many hungry eyes. But as every woman on the territory of Aghara-Penthay is automatically property, and slave, those who come willingly still cannot visit without a registered owner. The ankle bracelet, impossible to remove once locked into place, carries the information on her and her registration, much like an implant, and similarly can be used to track her, making her status permanent should the relationship falter.

Nonetheless, there are women eager to entrust themselves to a male companion, one who will become their owner and take them on one of the shuttles visiting the Hub. Some of these women choose poorly. It is common for men to sell their companions out, and the unlucky female finds her slavery becomes very real.

This one who wears blue is prettyish in a homespun way, brunette, a few years older than me. Her face is flushed with excitement.

“What about this girl, Navar?” she says to her companion.

It is male appetites that are responsible for the existence of worlds like Aghara-Penthay, and yet I find myself despising these women almost as much as their men. Studying politics, it’s common to come across individuals who take a sabbatical to a planet in poverty or crisis, because they want to witness the desperation. They seek out the experience, smearing themselves in the suffering of others because they know they’re safe to return soon enough to their privileged existences. The women in the blue wraps remind me of them.

These blue women crave to fully understand my universe, to augment their thrill. So in the private room, it’s not enough for them to have a threesome with an alien female who is unable to refuse them. They want to hear what it’s like, as though my miserable reality is nothing but the subject of some tawdry erotic fantasy. In a day or two, they’ll be back in their careers, drinking ethanol with their trusted girlfriends, showing them the unmistakable bracelet they have to conceal in the office, telling them about a sex slave named Coora.

But Navar has paid for the use of me. So I kiss his female, with genuine desire, when I’m ordered to do so. I let her suckle at my nipples. I use my tongue to arouse her. After her man has fucked us both, moving back and forth between penetrating one woman and then the next, they go off to a bar, while back in the cage I’m left still taste her juices.

And that’s just the first few hours of today.

10 - Progress

Illonya’s experience of capture was much like mine, except she was taken by the Slavers in a ground attack. Trained as a veterinarian, fate took her to an agricultural planet on the fringes of the Republic, close to the jumble of independent spatial territories. Too close, it turned out, for it was a place where best the farm workers recruited were frequently healthy young women, and one of the independent territories nearby was Aghara-Penthay. There was nowhere to hide in the vast open planes, grazed by the beasts under Illonya’s care, when a pirate raiding vessel dropped out of her sky. The Slavers slaughtered almost all the male workers, and took all the females who had value as captives.

Illonya arrived at the Hub a virgin, but that didn’t last long when she was processed, auctioned and bought by the Flower Garden. She doesn’t know exactly how many days she’s been here, but fast approaching is the era of the third Rape Run she’s witnessed from slavery.

Common slaves come and go all the time, but when a woman is kidnapped for the Rape Run, she often draws a crowd as she’s taken through the Hub to the shuttles, and her fate on the surface. Illonya didn’t see every one of these – for example she doesn’t remember Melena de Santo arriving – the Republic fleet officer who, along with the bounty hunter Ja-Alixxe, escaped from the Rape Run 4452.

But with the Flower Garden holding so many Gaianesians, Illonya won’t forget the 4453 Run, where the alien females in the brothel wept as they saw their beloved leader, White Queen, parading to her Run in a cruel formation with her fellow citizens. Rape Runners remain unviolated – the Slavers know that virginity adds value when the losers go to auction, but this nicety does not apply to any women taken along with them. Gaianesians believe women are physically and intellectually superior to men, and a woman cannot have her arousal Reflex triggered unless a part of her secretly desires this. They learned the error of this viewpoint, when the Slavers allowed the mass rape of White Queen’s honor guard, while their leader was forced to watch.

In the prelude to the Rape Run 4454, another mass rape is permitted on the Hub. I personally witness this one, along with Illonya. The Runner at the center of the chaos is a female called Tisya. She leads a religious sect called the Djenerion, who believe that only virgin women can access the enlightenment, and interpret it for the masses. Also, Djenerion believe only virgin females can access the most heavenly realms of the afterlife. The appeal to the Slavers was obvious.

Every one of the bodyguards who were taken with Tisya is brutally violated, in the full public gaze of the Hub. For a sadist, there’s not much better than raping a desirable woman, and tearing her future from her at the same time. There is barely a man at the brothels, when there’s so much sex available for free, only yards away. Illonya and I stand silently watching, holding hands, tears running down our faces. How can men be such brutes? How do they get away with this, time after time, year after year, with no-one able to stop them?

A couple of hours later, order has been restored on the Hub. A Dystyr beta male arrives, one who has seen the brothel’s advertising on the networks, and has travelled all the way here, just to rape me. As sometimes happens with the betas, he blames his lack of sexual success on women, rather than on his own genetics. Only this fellow has made a small fortune on a distant planet called Dodayosk. Enough credits to buy success. He tells me all this, because he wants to see me anticipating what’s coming. He’s made enough credit to purchase me, if he wishes, and easily enough to pay the penalty charges he would be fined for temporarily taking me out of commission.

I beg and plead, because that’s what he wants, but it only delays the inevitable. He takes a broad leather strap, and for the first time one of my own kind beats the living daylights out of me. I barely even remember the rape in its aftermath. I was half-unconscious by then. I just remember wishing that at the moment on the landing pad, when I’d just arrived on the surface of Aghara-Penthay, that I’d thrown myself from the tower.

Society on Aghara-Penthay is divided into four factions, each with a leader, also known as the Chief. The Flower Garden happens to be under the faction of The Alien, Jackran-ad-Aktar, the same faction which happened to be responsible for the raid where I was taken.

In the Rape Run, each faction leader, known as a Hunter for the duration of the contest, attempts to catch the most females. When a Runner is caught, she is raped, the violation broadcast for the enjoyment of the galactic audience, and then afterwards she is auctioned into slavery. Failed Rape Runners, their faces known across the cosmos, auction for staggering sums of credits. Only the last Runner evading capture is released, traumatized, but with her implant dormant, and otherwise unharmed.

As part of the Alien’s faction, we are expected to support his efforts to hunt the most Runners, even though the outcome makes no different to a slave girl. Clan colors decorate the walls. Coverage in the Flower Garden favors showing the Alien, or the Runners closest to him.

Lotho-Etsarra makes the first catch of the year, a non-human sportswoman named Siilka Noneeva. Jabal, who had a bet that Jackran-ad-Aktar would be first, is in a foul mood for the rest of the day, and we must do the best captives can to keep out of his way.

Lotho-Etsarra should be making the most of his lead and Hunting with renewed vigor, but if he does, oddly we see no coverage of him in the next day’s streams, and the Rape Run’s presenter, Wagner, makes no mention of him either. But Jackran-ad-Aktar takes advantage of the lull, and makes the first catch of Day 2, Rape Run 4454 – Baleria Acron, the host of an erotic gameshow named Harem. I used to love Harem – I’d laugh out loud at it from beginning to end. Now it is nothing to me – something banal, irrelevant. I don’t know why I ever even found it amusing.

Jackran-ad-Aktar is returning to his camp to destroy Baleria with his monstrous organ when he runs right across the Djenerion leader Tisya, caught in a risky crossing of open ground. Bad news for her, good news for us. Slavers love gambling, and Jabal gives all the slaves a sweet treat, sharing the winnings from backing his leader.

Our faction chief’s alien biology prevents him raping too frequently. Wagner’s official highlights broadcast of Baleria’s rape goes out across the universe, while Tisya has to wait in a side room, listening to the cries and anticipating her turn later in the day. And then Jackran-ad-Aktar’s feed drops. Technical problems are usually fixed quickly, but minutes turn to hours and there’s still no fresh footage of the Alien, and Lotho-Etsarra hasn’t been seen by the audience since yesterday evening either.

Even the slaves can tell something is wrong. The Slaver men are busy, apprehensive, talking to each other in urgent whispers. Guards are summoned to the surface, and they go with heavy armaments.

“… some kind of power play within one of the factions,” I overhear one of the guards tell Jabal.

The streams of the Hunters in the Run still show Salarin and Cronorgan. Salarin catches the news anchor, Donaya Oshanka, whom we saw on the shuttle, and as is his manner, begins to torment her brutally. Poor woman. But by now only the tourists are showing much interest in both the feeds, and in the females. A human male arrives from deep in the Republic, from the President’s home planet of Odaron Prime. He is a minor diplomat, and knows from my information that I was studying politics. He has no interest in discussing that, however. He has a fetish for sex with alien girls.

I know better than to reproach him for travelling to Aghara-Penthay to satisfy his vices with me, when touching me in the Republic would be an imprisonable offense. I thank him when it’s over, as I must do with all the men who buy the use of me. If a man seems less cruel to me than most, sometimes I will beg them to buy me permanently, and take me from this place. But the diplomat brushes my humble plea away. He just wanted one experience with a Dystyr, and now he will move on to his next species. Later in the day he returns to us, and chooses one of the Gaianesians for an hour.

I am considered desirable, and have knowledge and training in diplomacy. I would have made a useful consort to that male. But it seems I was not good enough to tempt him. And when someone does come who wants me, of course I only get slave luck.

11 - Luck

Eight days later, it is my turn to occupy the wooden wall. My hips and my lower body, behind the wall, are completely defenseless. My upper body is little better, for my wrists are trapped in the smaller holes at my sides. Although I can’t use my hands to protect myself, at least from the front I can see threats approaching. The wall holds me in a position leaning forwards, so after a while holding my head up causes an intense pain in my back and neck. The weight of my scorns hanging downwards makes this pose more uncomfortable than it is for women without the accessories.

My pitiable life on the Hub continues as normal, but down on the surface of the planet below me, there have been significant changes.

It turns out there was a reason for the disappearance of Lotho-Etsarra and Jackran-ad-Aktar from our screens during the Rape Run 4454. A group of brave women from the Djenerion Sect infiltrated the planet’s surface, reaching The Zone where the Run takes place, and in retribution for the Slavers abducting their leader, Tisya, these women began eliminating the faction chiefs.

The luckier members of the group were killed during the raid, but some, including their leader, were taken alive. An example had to be made of them – a fate so horrific it would deter any other women from taking a stand against the Slavers of Aghara-Penthay. This planet and its Hub are generally accepted to be the worst world in the universe to be female, but compared to those poor creatures, I have achieved slave luck. Those women had their limbs amputated; they were muted; muted in every respect so they couldn’t even communicate by moving their heads; and then they were handed over to the Elmek. The Elmek, Wagner told us, are a species of tiny humanlike beings, who fetishize devouring the sex organs of normal sized females. Slowly. It will take months for those poor Djenerion to be devoured. All those months they will spend in terrible pain; unable to move; unable to speak; unable to flee; unable to beg. They will lie there, reflecting on their actions, praying to their Gods for a salvation that will never come.

The men of Aghara-Penthay cannot be without faction leaders, and the power vacuum was quickly filled. Some of the men of The Alien and The Libido’s faction went over to Salarin and Cronorgan, but most united under a powerful new chief. His name is Monad. This brothel, the Flower Garden, was formally under Jackran-ad-Aktar, so Jabal, like most men, lacking the courage to form his own faction, quickly swore his fealty to Monad.

Slavers are all cruel, but word reaches even us that this “Monad” is something special. They say he’s more animal than human. They say he never backs down from a fight. They say he rules by fear. They say no-one else uses a woman after he’s had her.

And this is the one whom fate has decreed now has ultimate power over us all, here at the Flower Garden.

The Hub has been quiet today. Approximately an hour ago, someone behind the wall fucked me hard. I did not see his face, but he did it roughly, as though he hated me. Perhaps he was a Dystyr male, perhaps not. Why do so many men hate women like me? When they take us, it’s about more than raping us. They’re getting even, settling a grudge.

Recovering in the wall, I’m staring at the floor, lamenting being born female, when I hear a strangely familiar voice.

“Coora,” someone male says to me.

I look up, and cry out in shocked humiliation.

Jurong is standing in front of me, staring at me. Oh no, oh no! His dreams are finally fulfilled. I am naked before Jurong, a Jurong who is transfixed at the sight of me. I am too familiar with that expression of hunger. This will not end well.

“Gods, Coora,” he says to me, “your tits are even better than I imagined they would be.”

“No!” I plead, shaking my trapped arms in a futile effort to conceal myself. “Please, don’t look at me Jurong, not when I’m like this.”

“But you’re beautiful, Coora,” he says. “You shouldn’t be ashamed. And you should see how you look from the back.”

I close my eyes in despair, blinking back the tears. Being naked and degraded in front of strangers is one thing, but here is someone who knows me from when I had dignity.

“How much is it for a session with you?”

Oh Gods, please not him. But he presses, “Answer me, Coora.”

“One hundred credits, if you want to go inside. Ask the Slaver, Jabal, and he’ll have me released from here.”

I’m supposed to say “One hundred credits, Master”, but I can’t bear using that term with him.

“One hundred credits? There’s plenty of girls on the Hub for much less than that.”

Good. Let him use one of those poor creatures.

“But then, they’re not you. They’re not my Coora.”

“Please Jurong,” I beg, straining to free my wrists. “If you have any kind feelings towards me, please don’t rape me.”

“You know Coora, when you struggle, the way your breasts shake is exquisite,” he says, and I stop dead. “You should keep still if you want to deter men.”

“Please, Jurong,” I beg again, but I plead from a stationary position all the same.

“Everything will be okay. I’m going inside,” he says, and I burst into tears. Please, somebody help me. Not this…

Jurong has gone from my view. Soon Jabal appears, but not with Jurong. I am released from my position. I stand there weeping openly, rubbing my sore neck to ease the discomfort.

“Put your wrap on. You look like a slut, standing there naked,” Jabal snaps at me.

I scrabble on the floor for the meagre bundle of clothing. I wasn’t planning to dress for the short distance inside the brothel. Not because I’m lazy or unashamed, but because clothing myself will only give Jurong the satisfaction of ordering me to remove it. But I can’t disobey Jabal, so I secure my wrap in place with the approved tie – a bow under the left arm. Right-handedness is most common among males across the universe, and they naturally reach to our left sides. The knot can be untied easily, and we can be stripped while restrained.

The rooms inside the brothel are utterly impersonal – more like being in a hotel room than an individual’s bedroom. The lighting is soft pinks and oranges. The colors are supposed to hide skin blemishes, but with my iridescent tone I think they make me look sickly. There are no bed covers, just a mattress with a cover that can be quickly removed for cleaning. All around the bed are anchor points for restraints – hooks and alloy eyeholes. The equipment for this is in drawers under the bed. Everything a man may require is there – I know from bitter experience - cuffs, chains, ropes, gags, clamps, whips, phalluses, vibrators, lubricants, and blindfolds.

A small table is stocked with spirits, ethanols, stimulants, and forms of aphrodisiac. We are forbidden from using anything on the table, unless we do so under instruction from a client.

Jurong is sitting on the bed of this room, looking around with great curiosity.

“This is your home?” he asks.

“None of this is my home,” I answer tersely. “A slave cannot have possessions. We use whichever room is free.”

“You’re going to be like this, today, are you, Coora?” he says with a wry smile, as though I’m being unreasonable. “I’ve come a long way to see you.”

“You’ve paid for me,” I say bitterly. “Just have your fun, and go away, Jurong.”

“Your profile says you’ve been highly trained in slave skills,” Jurong says, ignoring my animosity. “I guess you didn’t find much use for your politics here, huh? Show them to me, Coora. That’s an order. Serve me Danaean Spirit, but humbly, the way a trained slave serves her master.”

I cannot refuse. Pouring the drink, I must kneel before him to present it, kissing the rim of the glass and then lifting it to him, as though in offering to a God. I must kneel with my thighs wide apart. In the demeaning wrap, this will hide nothing of my core from him.

While I make the preparations, he talks.

“The college held a memorial service, for all those who died or were taken in the pirate attack,” Jurong tells me, as though he thinks anything in my past matters now. “Nearly two hundred from our class were on that ship. Just from our class, one-hundred-and-twenty-nine women were taken alive. Twenty-four were killed, either by the Slavers or by ending themselves. Nineteen males enslaved, and fifteen of them killed. The lucky remainder of the men evaded capture, but no women from the class returned home. All told, nearly five hundred captives were taken in the raid on Moons of Odaron, the vast majority of them females captured for sexual slavery.”

And one of those young females was me. I kneel as a sex slave before Jurong, my former classmate, humbling myself, spreading my thighs to give an obscene view of the private place between my legs. I kiss the drink glass and present it to him holding it extended with both hands. I keep my head submissively down, but must look at him, so he can see my eyes.

Jurong takes the glass from me, and sips.

“That is good spirit,” he says.

I do not reply.

“Ilza is the women’s class president now,” Jurong continues. “All the guys want to date her, now there’s so few women left. There’s just a handful of women from our year that weren’t on the voyage.”

I remember Ilza. She was one of those jealous, spiteful types.

“I bet she likes that,” I can’t help saying. “She’d like knowing I’m here.”

“She does know you’re here. You, Trindii, all of them. There’s a big display showing all the ones who were taken, Coora, a memorial,” he says, and I moan in humiliation. The tears are coming again. Please, don’t let me cry in front of Jurong.

“You probably know this as well, but the Slavers advertise everything about the girls working on the Hub,” he presses relentlessly. “All your information is there. It says you weren’t a virgin when you were taken. That disappointed me. But you’re one of only a few who were enslaved that can be traced. I was so relieved when I saw that you were in a brothel. Most of the girls have probably been sold privately, and are lost. Trindii has disappeared. Cliria is gone, somewhere. Eleese is gone. Gods, she was hot. It’s a lucky man gets to own that. But really, for me there was only ever you, Coora.”

What am I supposed to say to that? His interest in me was always beyond friendship, beyond anything I sought. Last time we met, I struck Jurong in the head with an ornament to escape him raping me. I won’t be so lucky this time.

“Was the idea of sex with me really that bad, Coora?” he asks, rubbing his skull in that same spot the sculpture hit. When he sees I’m not going to reply, he demands, “Answer me. Truthfully.”

The compulsion of an implant on its victim is absolute.

“I’ve never had feelings for you in that way,” I say, trying to be as diplomatic as possible. “Dystyr women usually only want our alpha Dystyr males.”

“But now, I’m probably not such a bad prospect, huh?” he presses. “I mean, I bet you’ve been taken by worse than me.”

I pause, recalling some the horrors in my recent history.

“That’s true, Jurong.”

“Maybe regretting your actions, just a little? Think about it: only moments after our scene in that cabin, the Slavers withdrew to make their escape. It must torment you that if you’d only put out for me, and we’d had sex that day, we’d have probably not been discovered. My cock, instead of all those others and an implant.”

Gods, I hate this guy.

“Did I ever tell you, my family are very wealthy?” he switches subject, suddenly finishing his drink in one gulp, and putting the glass back on the table.

I can’t bear another second of this small talk. The anticipation of him touching me is a form of torture, and I’ve had enough.

“I’m an implanted slave, Jurong,” I say, turning to face him. “We both know I can’t stop you. But please - don’t draw this out – if you’re going to do it, do it, then go home to Iniver Four, and continue to live your privileged life.”

“But that’s my point, Coora,” he says, as though he’s explaining something to an idiot. “I graduated with first class honors. My family are very pleased, and want to reward me. I could ask for you to be that reward – ask for funds to rescue a slave who was a former classmate. You can’t go back to a normal life, not with an implant in your brain, but in the Republic with me, you’d technically be free.”

My jaw drops as my universe does a paradigm shift. Women like me all learn that the only way to survive slavery, mentally is to remain in the now. But from nowhere I’m confronted with the idea that I might have a future – a life beyond the Flower Garden. I’ve never been good at withholding tears, and again the sob comes without warning.

“We live in the Rainbow Cluster,” he says. “You should see it, Coora – one of the most beautiful views in the galaxy, except for the view of yourself, of course. Gas clouds of all colors, and millions of stars, stretching to infinity. You feel a connection to the eternal.”

My mind is racing though, and already I’m coming down from the high.

“And what would you want from me in exchange, Jurong?” I ask in a trembling voice.

“Well, no other woman will touch me, once she sees I’m keeping a former sex slave,” he says, his voice hardening. “They’ll all judge, even though my intentions are good. So you’ll have to be my companion. My intimate companion, and you’ll give me the things I’ve always craved from you.”

“So I’ll not be a sex slave, just a prostitute,” I say angrily, “sleeping with you in exchange for a place away from here. And I’ll never be able to leave you, not when you only have to speak and I’ll come running back.”

“You studied gender politics, Coora,” Jurong defends himself. “You know that sex is almost always transactional. The woman gives her body, in exchange for resources, protection, support… For an implanted female, that situation is just a bit more overt.”

He thinks, then adds, “I have a lot to offer you, Coora, and you’re not exactly in the best bargaining position right now.”

I frown.

“And what about right now? What do you want today?”

“What I do in the hour I’ve paid for depends on you, Coora. Put yourself in my place. I desire you, but I can hardly to take you back to the Republic, just for you to tell the first person you meet that I raped you when we were on Aghara-Penthay,” answers Jurong. “So I need to be sure you’re committed to me, genuinely committed, and that you won’t try to flee as soon as you’re in free space. So here’s what I suggest. If you want to be mine, you’re going to bang me now, choose to bang me of your own free will, and you’re going to do as though you think I’m the most desirable guy in the universe. Convince me, and afterwards I’ll put things in motion to begin the purchase.”

Sex with the repulsive Jurong. It occurs to me this might all be a trick – he might walk out of here, never having intended to save me, and I’d never see him again. The ultimate humiliation. I’d have given him myself, as though we were lovers, for nothing.

“And if I refuse?” I ask.

“You won’t, unless you’re a fool. But if remaining here looks better than a life with me… Why, your consent doesn’t matter, does it?”

So that’s it. Give myself to Jurong, or be raped by Jurong. He’s not the first since my enslavement to say “treat me nice, and I’ll buy you”. But with those men and Jurong I would be a fool to refuse. Any chance of leaving the Hub and returning to some form of life inside the Republic is better than my existence here.

“Lie back on the bed, please, my dear Master, Jurong” I say, trying to hide my revulsion and make my voice sound tender, and when he complies, I straddle him, reaching for the knot fastening of my wrap.

And then, for the first time, I screw someone for my life.

12 - Relocation.

After an hour play acting like the regular girlfriend, once I’ve kissed him goodbye and he’s gone, I think I’ve probably been conned like I was with the others, and I hate myself. But then a couple of shifts after my encounter, I’m abruptly released from my duties in the display cages out front, and I’m escorted inside. There’s a small room at the back of the brothel that functions as Jabal’s office, and to there I am taken.

“Coora – that gadget there is to go tightly around your neck,” my owner commands gruffly, throwing a large metal ring the diameter of my throat onto the desk. “And that…” and another jumble of metalwork goes onto the desk with a clatter, “is for covering your cunt.”

I pick up the collar, bemused. It looks like the shock device that was locked onto me when I was first captured, but this one has a taller band, and writing on it.

“Sold: Do not use”, it says.

I look at Jabal, my heart suddenly racing. Does this mean?

“Hurry up, put it on,” he snaps, and I quickly snap the collar around my neck. I push it as far as it will go, and hear the lock activate with an instant click.

I haven’t worn the other device before, but I know what it is. In a brothel, there’s not normally a reason to lock sex slaves into chastity belts. I step into the metalwork, pulling it up to my core as though I’m putting on panties. At the back, there is a small opening that will rest on my anus – large enough to void solids through, but not big enough for a penis to penetrate. A tiny slit at the front permits urination. I pull it up into place and discover the rear band sits deep between my buttocks, and is quite uncomfortable. I’m not sure what I think of this thing. The belt will be difficult to clean, and unhygienic if I have to wear it for long. But then it does prevent me being used. At one time I would have considered this thing demeaning, obscene, but Gods, now it feels good to have something protecting my vulva.

I push the fittings closed, and hear a lock click on the belt, too.

“A client has taken a fancy to you,” says Jabal, disapproving. “It happens, sometimes, with the offworlders – they fixate on one slave. The Slavers know this is a mistake,” (his tone turns smug). “This never happens with us. We understand the truth, that the value of a female is measured only in her desirability, and the next fresh slave, who is therefore more desirable, is always on the way.” “

Jabal gives me a moment to consider his wisdom. Then he indicates the small window, the one looking through to the club’s lounge, and then out onto the Mezzanine.

“For example, look out there, Coora.”

I obey.

“The next Coora has probably already walked through there, and is training on the surface.”

I could think of replies to this, but before I have a chance, the belt begins buzzing softly – the source of the vibration coming from a spot pressing right against my clitoris.

“Oh!” I cry, and pull at the metal band covering my core, but it’s too tight to budge.

Warm liquid pleasure spills out through my lower body. I feel myself starting to become aroused.

“But the obsessions of clients make good business for us, so we don’t argue when the offworlders form their attachments,” Jabal continues, ignoring my embarrassed surprise. “He has paid well over your value, to secure you. You’ll be pleased to know you have been a profitable purchase for the house.”

After perhaps thirty seconds of intense vibration, by which time I’m getting quite turned on and my legs are starting to tremble, the buzzing stops, as abruptly as it began. Frustrated, I push the alloy against my sex, wanting the pleasure back.

“Who paid for me, Master?” I then ask humbly. Jurong – it must be Jurong. It would be too much of a coincidence otherwise.

“Like to know, wouldn’t you?” he smiles with a flash of the familiar cruelty.

“The client will return to collect you in three days. During your wait, he has specified you are not to be used to provide sexual services.”

No sexual services… Does that mean? Oh, Gods be praised. I go weak with relief. The end of my suffering is in sight. I might have already had sex for the last time on Aghara-Penthay.

“The belt will prevent other men from raping you. During your waking hours, it will arouse you for thirty seconds out of every two minutes. It will activate more discretely during the night – you’re in for some very erotic dreams, Coora. I promise you, when your new master collects you, he’ll find his slave very desperate to please.”

I push again at the alloy against my core. So how long have I got before it fires again? Less than a minute? I know better than to object – Jabal has said nothing to indicate I can’t be punished for the next three days, if I show any sign of rebellion. It will just have to be endured.

“As you please, Master.”

“You can still be of some use, until your owner comes. You will serve food and drinks to clients. You will wait out front, and when males take an interest in a Dystyr, direct them to use Illonya.”

“As you please, Master.”

“You will share my bed at nights. There are ways to enjoy a woman without penetrating the usual holes. Especially if she’s so turned-on that she’s going half-crazy.”

I repress a shudder at the prospect of feeling Jabal’s hands mauling me. But show dislike, and I will only make it more enjoyable for him.

“As you please, Ma… Oh!”

The buzzing against my sex returns, without warning. And it feels good. I feel my face glow with the flush of arousal. I push at the alloy, trying to maneuver it against the most pleasurable protrusion of my flesh. I’m wondering whether, if I’m prepared and pre-excited, tonight if there’s a moment alone I might bring myself to orgasm, from just thirty seconds of stimulation.

Jabal watches me, smiling knowingly. The room is silent for a moment, save for the soft buzz of the belt and the ever present sound of the Hub’s atmosphere processors. Again the vibration vanishes, just as it was getting really interesting. I poke and prod at the belt, irritated.

“Quite something, isn’t it?” Jabal says wryly. “Well, you’re dismissed, for now, Coora. Go and help the others.”

I stumble out into the main area of the brothel, my heart pounding. Around my neck is a collar which says Sold: Do not use. A chastity belt inhibits access to my sex organs.

A large central lounge area forms the main room of the Flower Garden. The front is open to the Mezzanine, which it is easy to think of as “outside”, although of course we remain enclosed on the vast orbital station of The Hub. Doors lead from the lounge into the bedrooms, and the functional spaces of the brothel. Against one wall of the lounge – actually one of the major bulkheads securing the station’s integrity, is the bar. Here Myrune – one of the Gaianesian women, sits talking with a potential customer. Her red slave wrap does not adequately cover her.

A group of males walks past the front of the brothel. They are loud, brutish, drunk. They laugh at the woman currently filling the wall. I cannot tell who she is, being only able to view her naked rear.

All this, I only have to endure for a couple of days. It makes it so much easier to bear, knowing the scene around me is no longer my future. I am destined for what? Jurong? The Rainbow Galaxy? He wouldn’t have been my choice, but I’ll take him over…

Godsdammit!

Once more the belt fires up without warning, and I double over, clutching at my crotch. It seems that each time it fires, the effect of the stimulation on me seems to get more intense. And this is after just a few activations. How will I feel after hours of this?

I’m already wondering – who ordered the vibrating belt? Was it Jurong? He would likely want me to be more interested in him, sexually. Well, his plan will inevitably succeed if the intensity continues to ramp like this. Unwanted, the memory of feeling Jurong’s clammy hands on my naked body returns. Eurghh! I push it away, then try to accept it. Better Jurong’s hands from within the Republic, than the many others who have had their hands on me on Aghara-Penthay.

Myrune’s eyes take in the view of me, with my strange collar, doubled over clutching my groin. And then the vibration is gone. I move behind the bar, and feigning nonchalance I begin mopping ethanol spirits with a dirty rag.

“Ain’t you something?” Myrune’s companion says to me, leering crudely. He’s a human – older, unshaven for several days and rank from his own body odor. “They kept you hidden in the back. How much is an hour inside your snatch?”

“I’m not for sale, Master,” I say, indicating the collar. I’m careful not to sound disrespectfully smug about this fact.

“Well, I’ll just have to take it out on your friend, then,” he says testily, and turns back to Myrune. “How much for your pretty ass?”

The rest of my afternoon comprises of encounters much like this. A large group of males on a pre-wedding party chooses us as their favorite establishment, and almost all the girls of the house are kept busy entertaining them. There’s so much demand for women to serve in the bedrooms that even today’s girl in the wall – Hoola, another of the Gaianesians, is brought back into service. But I still remain unused. My relief is almost unbearable. Even with the repeating torment from the belt, this is my least miserable day since capture. I’ve been equipped with a mental shield which protects me from everything. This is temporary. This is temporary. That’s the mantra I keep repeating. Soon, I’ll be in the Republic. Implanted, but free. I will see the Rainbow Galaxy.

The other women inevitably see the sold sign around my neck, and react with envy when they hear the explanation. Aghara-Penthay is their forever, but no longer mine. I will be leaving. How did I achieve such a feat, when they did not?

The time which is designated as night arrives on The Hub, and I go to Jabal’s bed. There, he gropes me, relentlessly and as intimately as he can while being inhibited by the belt. I can bear it, even when he climaxes by rubbing himself against my thigh.

I can bear that the belt, which has been activating all day, even though it has intensified so much that I turn to liquid in his arms. I can bear the image of Jurong pressing into me. I can bear Jabal’s cum on my leg.

Because my future is away from here.

Next morning, I wake from a series of intensely obscene dreams, to find myself so aroused I’m barely able to stand. It’s going to be a long day. Dismissed from Jabal’s cabin, I take my place in the bar area. Mornings in the brothel are usually the quietest and slowest period. Most revelers visiting The Hub party late into the night. And those who need their lust sating early prefer to go directly to the bedrooms, rather than hanging around drinking in the public areas.

My morning begins as smoothly as it can for a girl who by now is desperate to orgasm. At least it does until there is a loud commotion from along the Mezzanine. I look up and see a posse of Slaver men are approaching, from the direction where the shuttles leave down to Aghara-Penthay’s surface.

I haven’t seen our new faction leader, but I don’t need have done in order to tell who’s approaching. In the middle of the group is a giant male, half a head taller than those around him, radiating authority. A warning must have been passed back, for Jabal, still fastening his pants, and the other males who staff the Flower Garden, come hurrying out to meet him. Hoola emerges with one of the junior men. She looks as if she’s just woken up.

“Know who I am?” the giant says, scanning the group with eyes that miss nothing.

“Dread Monad,” says Jabal in a trembling voice.

“Let’s get to the point. The credits coming from this brothel are well below some of the others,” says Monad. “Why is that? Are you stealing my coin?”

“Of course not, dread Monad!” stammers Jabal, shaking with fear. “We’re near the end of the Mezzanine. The houses in the middle get the most trade. And the Flower Garden deals in non-human women. They’re a niche product.”

“Are these two all of your product?” barks Monad, indicating Hoola and myself. “Show me what else you have.”

“Some of them are with clients. And some of them are sleeping.”

“Do you think I care?”

“Fetch the girls,” Jabal quickly orders the underlings. In response to a murmured query he adds, “no, all of them.”

I line up side by side with the other women. We’re in no particular order. I happen to have the frizzy-haired Gaianesian, Hoola on one side, and the other Dystyr female, Illonya, on the other.

And then my belt fires up.

“Urghh,” I moan sensually, my body jerking as I resist the urge to double over and clutch my crotch. In a moment, I’ve recovered myself, but by then it’s too late.

“Nice. What’s the story with the one in heat?” growls Monad. I’m staring at the floor and don’t see where he’s looking, but I just know he’s talking about me.

“A client just bought her,” says Jabal. “The sale made us a lot of credit, too. He wanted the belt fitted, so she’d be desperate for him by the time he arrived.”

So it was Jurong. I knew it. But there’s no time to think about him.

“Step forward, you with the belt,” Monad says, so of course, I do.

“Look at me.”

Even though meeting his gaze makes me tremble more than the belt, this too I obey.

“You’re a beauty, aren’t you?” he says gruffly, his stare direct. “I don’t usually like scorns on women, but they suit you.”

My reaction betrays me.

“Ha. See that? She was surprised I know their proper name. The slit expected me to be stupid. She thought she was cleverer than me, even though she’s the one standing there with an implant in her skull. What’s your name, slave?”

“Coora, Master,” I reply, trying to sound as humble as possible. I’m desperate to convey that I’m not a woman who thinks herself superior to the faction leader.

“You:” Monad says, turning back to Jabal. “Have the collar taken off her, and throw away that belt. She’s coming with me.”

“But she’s sold…” blusters Jabal. “And for a lot of credit.”

“Do you want to argue?” Monad smiles maliciously. “Then please, argue…”

“Of course not.”

“Then do as I ask. Or before the day’s end, you’ll be implanted as well, and joining your girls.”

So within minutes after beginning my day with hope, I’m padding after Monad, inconsolable with despair. I’d been tricked into hoping, for a while. Most of the women look sympathetic as I depart, but a few look satisfied by my changing fortunes.

Please, please, let this new hell be short lived, I pray. I was getting used to the feel of my belt, and without its presence I feel as exposed as I did when I was first stripped before men. I feel my scorns brush against my rump as I walk.

I follow Monad to the shuttle bays. It seems I’m heading back to the surface. The last shuttle I had used was crowded with captives. This one’s only passengers are Monad, and a few men of his retinue. The rest of the hold is packed with food crates – Aghara-Penthay being reliant on supplies from offworld for its nutrition.

I am the only female present.

“Kneel,” Monad commands me as he relaxes in a comfortable seat, and of course I drop to my knees, assuming the orthodox slave position, as I have been trained. The faction leader sits with his thighs spread, as do many men. His crotch is level with my eyeline. I see the bulge of a large organ, but I see he is not yet aroused. I wonder what triggers him. It would better help me please him if I understood his tastes.

A deep clunking sound and a slight shifting sensation from the artificial gravity tells me the shuttle has undocked, and for the second time in my life I’m dropping to the planet’s surface. My spirits sink as we descend.

I lower my gaze, and see my hands are trembling. I’ve heard the rumors that no other man uses a woman after Monad has had her, but what exactly could that mean? He keeps every one of them for himself? With the overly endowed men such as the late unlamented Alien, they boast that their conquests are too stretched to feel anything again. Perhaps that is it. Perhaps the females he uses are moved to non-sexual service. I could cope with that fate.

“What did you do, before you were enslaved?” Monad asks, abruptly breaking the silence.

“I was studying politics, Master,” I answer, “at the Capital University. On Iniver Four.”

“I know where Capital University is,” he says dismissively. “Your homeworld – the Dystyr planet – it has many female politicians? Women are treated equally?”

“Yes, Master.”

“And do you believe in equality? What does your politics teach you is the recurring fate of benevolent societies?”

I’m not sure how to answer. Fairness is such a central tenet of the Republic it’s impossible to think there could be a better way.

“Huh!” Monad snorts derisively as I frame my answer. “She had to think. Pretty, but not bright then.”

There is no reply to that which helps me, so I am silent.

“The answer is: a group without scruples will always outperform those around them who are restricted by morality,” states Monad. “As long as the whole does not act the same way. It is the same for individuals. Put a few predators in the herd, and the predators do best. Discuss, student.”

“Equality brings a broader pool of capability, Master,” I feel obliged to argue. “Eventually, the extra ability means they conquer the oppressors.”

“And yet, there you are, a prime specimen of a Republic female, drawn from the largest ‘capability pool’ in history, naked at my feet, and a slave,” counters Monad. “Aghara-Penthay is the predatory world. The Republic is the herd. We take what capability we want from you, to serve our pleasure. The Republic could bomb my home to oblivion, if it had the balls. Instead, your men come here on vacation in safety, because their leaders have scruples about eliminating innocent victims. We act without limits.”

I shake my head, but he commands, “arouse yourself,” and I must obey.

I’m sure I’m correct, and yet I’m the one left fingering my clitoris, while he enjoys the view. And this remains the situation as I reach the planet’s vile surface for the second time.

Perhaps I’m expecting days of waiting in a cell again, but on disembarking I learn that Monad is going directly to a meeting with the other faction leaders, and I am the one chosen to accompany him.

“You want to see real politics in action?” Monad growls to me. “It is time to have your wish.”

This is far from my wish. My dream was to see galactic politics as a participant, working to make the universe a better place for all species. Not as a trophy – an objectified symbol of a faction Chief’s power. But such is the fate of Coora. So I meekly follow my new master into ancient chamber – a space with sandstone walls, containing eight heavy thrones, each carved from a single piece of rock. Eight faction leaders must have been the highest number there’s been in Aghara-Penthay’s history, but in the era of my slavery, there are only three leaders occupying chairs - Salarin, Cronorgan and Monad.

I’ve seen broadcasts of the faction leaders many times, but the experience of being in their presence feels very different. Salarin strikes such terror into the universe’s women that I’ve somehow imagined him as gigantic, but in reality, he’s small for a human male, and has a slim, wiry build. The Sadist is elderly and grey haired, but still has a vitality about him. I could believe he’ll continue to victimize the galaxy’s females for many years yet. I know he becomes aroused by women’s suffering, and kneeling so close, I can believe it. The air around him radiates with menace.

Cronorgan is entirely hairless – a look which is pleasing and natural on Dystyr males, but in humans makes them seem effeminate and immature. He is rather overweight, which furthers the impression that here someone babyish. I know better than to let his appearance fool me. He is the Dominant. His pleasure is breaking women so they comprehend nothing but their slavery, and he does it very well.

And there is Monad. Giant, and muscular compared to his compatriots. Monad is battle-scarred and grizzled, a contrast to the other men on whom I don’t see the least blemish. Here sits a man who takes by force, and he’s willing to fight for it.

Behind each of the enthroned Chiefs sits three of his bureaucrats, on smaller chairs to reflect their lesser status. A fleet captain who oversees the faction’s piracy and capture of victims, a contracts adviser, responsible for the faction’s finances and retail agreements, and finally - the manager of the faction’s slaves, who deals with training, processing, and all matters from captives’ arrival up to their point of sale.

The final attendees are us – the women. Each Chief brings a sample of the finest female flesh he possesses, displaying a prize such as her to the other males as proof of his status. Three of the finest slavegirls in the universe. I take no pleasure in being in such exalted company. I was forty-nine, and I know that only on a planet where women have rights and are respected, is beauty a benefit. I feel nothing but pity for my fellow creatures.

The first one I notice is the woman at Salarin’s feet first, and I do a double take when I see her. Surely, the one kneeling there is Ja-Alixxe. The female bounty hunter, who was captured and forced to participate in the Rape Run two years ago, is more famous that the faction chiefs. I remember she escaped the Run, along with the Republican colonel, Melena de Santo. But Ja-Alixxe was recaptured, and after being condemned to be raped to death, the galaxy saw her martyred in an explosion on the Hub.

Apparently not. Still, what does it matter to me if one slave lives or dies? The Slavers have their ruses.

I can’t help but study her, though. Some women mentally disintegrate during slavery, but Ja-Alixxe looks remarkably well. Her eyes still sparkle with fire – she looks angry, even. She has the perfect body of an athlete. Salarin must have been making her exercise. They have done something cruel to her nipples and her genitals. Instead of the normal color of human flesh, Ja-Alixxe’s organs are silver, as though they’ve been sprayed with a metallic paint. Her breasts have been enlarged since I last saw her in the feeds.

At Cronorgan’s feet kneels a non-human - a stunning example of the Gaianesian species, only distinguishable from human women by irises of a deep purple shade, and a pattern of markings on her forehead in a similar color. The Gaianesians in the Flower Garden were beauties, but this one is exceptional.

Cronorgan keeps his hand knotted in this woman’s hair for the entire duration of the council, applying a gentle pressure. I wonder what that must feel like. In the brothel I’ve seen enough evidence of the Gaianesian females’ involuntary response – a reflex – a shameful genetic trait from their past which renders them sexually receptive when their hair is pulled. Perhaps this is true. At even the least movement which causes a tug from Cronorgan, I notice there is an instant when the girl’s eyes defocus, she stares into space, and her lips part sensuously.

And I complete this unlucky threesome, my iridescent blue-green skin and my scorns making my appear the most-nonhuman of the slaves.

“This is Coora,” grunted Monad, as I took my place kneeling at his feet, facing into the circle with my back resting against his massive shin. “She believes equality is going to save her.”

And without warning he loops my scorns around my throat, and tugs them tight like they’re a noose – using my own flesh press into my throat. From nowhere, he’s begun choking me. I struggle to rise and get up, but he barks at me to stay in position, and my legs drop faster than if I’d been axed. I lift my hands instead, and use those to struggle with the scorns, trying to pull them enough to loosen them and inhale. This effort Monad permits, but probably only because I’m so ineffective. He holds me in this position, my windpipe crushed, until I begin to panic. It’s probably only for thirty seconds, but I’m beginning to see stars, and fear makes the time feel much longer.

Monad releases his hold long enough to let me cough a strangled breath, but as soon as that’s done, the scorns cinch close and throttle me again. My own flesh is choking me once more, and I pull at it. No, he’s leaving it too long – does he want me to faint? And again, as my terror begins to peak for the second time, I’m given a short moment to gasp for oxygen.

The men are discussing prospective victims for next year’s Rape Run, as though my plight isn’t happening, but intent with my fight for survival I’ve stopped listening to the business of governing a planet. I’m trying to work my fingers inside the noose of flesh so I can give myself an air-gap. Monad, fully aware of my plan, adjusts the grip of his huge fist, and pulls back against my neck even more tightly.

I try to plea for mercy, fingers scrabbling vainly at the bands crushing my windpipe, but I can emit no sound.

“No, hands to your thighs,” Monad commands me now, and in spite of my desperation, I still must obey. I rest the backs of my hands on my naked thighs, in the classic slave kneeling position.

He permits me another gasp of air – just for a fraction of a second.

I’m trying to understand what is expected of me. Does he want me to pass out, in which case it would be better to just feign losing consciousness? Perhaps it is my fear which pleases him? I don’t need acting to show I’m afraid.

Salarin pulls back on Ja-Alixxe’s hair, mirroring the Gaianesian’s posture, so the bounty hunter must watch me. There is pity in her expression – an emotion I don’t remember ever seeing from her during her time in the Rape Run. The Gaianesian woman, in contrast, looks utterly terrified. Is the sight of me that bad?

Starved of oxygen, my awareness begins to become less real, and it feels as though I’m falling backwards. At that point I am permitted another brief breath, and I’m catapulted back into my body. A minion of Salarin’s is addressing the leaders. He mentions the name “Yarook”.

“He’s not getting even the ugliest piece of cunt from me,” growls Monad from behind me. “I’d rather cut their throats.”

The declaration must have provoked my Master to anger, for without warning I’m flung forward, landing heavily and painfully on my front on the hard floor. I start pushing myself back up, but Monad barks “Lie there! Wrap those things tighter around your neck.”

An order is an order, and any resistance dissolves instantly.

The meeting pauses, silent, while I circle the braids of my own body even tighter about my neck. Behind me, I hear my owner rising to his feet. Compelled my implant, I lie there, limp and docile, ready for whatever he intends of me.

I’m lying on a thick rug, but the floor is very uncomfortable. My cheek feels as though it was bruised in my tumble to the floor. The scorns, wrapped “tighter” as he commanded, are too tight to breathe, and the strange shimmering starlight is creeping back into the edges of my vision.

And then my master falls on me, crushing the rest of the air from my lungs out into a strangled scream of pain. I have no lubrication on my backside, and the suffering from him suddenly piercing my anus is brutal. The agony of him raping my rear would be enough to make me scream on and on, if only I could, but he drags hard back on the living noose, and a woman needs air to cry out.

“Is this really necessary?” I hear Cronorgan ask as Monad ruts into me, violating me in front of them all. “She’s a nice sample, and it’s a waste if you’re going to do this every single time.”

“I’ll sell her to you if you admit you’re weak, and you care for her?” Monad replies, the sound of his voice amplified through me by the pressure from our bodies being crushed together.

Seconds more pass. Even with my dwindling consciousness, they are seconds of unbearable suffering. I’m waiting for Monad to let me take a breath, like he has done over and over so far. Surely it must be soon. This ordeal can’t go on much longer. Meanwhile his cock feels enormous inside my bowel. Dystyr women’s bodies are similar to human females, when it comes to the proportions of our back passages. We’re equally able to survive anal penetration, but it’s less commonly practiced in our society. I hope Jurong doesn’t expect me to endure that.

I start to notice my ears filling with a beautiful sound, as though a choir of a thousand voices are forming one perfect chord. My vision has dwindled right down to a pinpoint now. Most of my view is filled with bright light. I think I am falling.

And finally, I understand.

Sexual killing is almost unheard of in Dystyr society. It is as alien to me as my iridescent skin and my scorns are to the humans. So I barely have time to consider the idea that must have been apparent to the observers – that Monad does not intend to let me breathe, ever again. “No man uses a female after Monad has had her”. Oh, I think. That’s what they meant.

I’m not sure why, but I feel strangely calm as I consider my end. I may even shed a sparkling tear, but it becomes a star before I have chance to catch it. I look up, following it towards the void of space.

And I see the Rainbow Galaxy.

Standing, I run naked and unashamed towards infinity.

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