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.