Chapter 3
“Oh, my god!”
I wake up, having remembered what feels like a small lifetime.
Not everything. What happened after I woke up is still gone, but my brain seems to be healing, or maybe reintegrating, or maybe the chip that’s doing this is…
I don’t know. I’m not technologically or medically able to discern the reason.
I just know that when I open my eyes, I find myself in the blanket bed with new memories to hand.
I try to put a timeline together, something simple. Something I can hold onto.
I tried to escape Earth once, got caught and saved by the same aliens who are now mad at me because they think I’m fucking with them.
They made me their pet once they met me. But I don’t really remember what that entails. I just know that they had me in their possession and somehow I ended up back on Earth with no memory of what happened, or why. Something to do with the illegal human pet trade? That seems to be the common theme.
I don’t have to mentally call them Mr. Hot or Mr. Grumpy anymore.
I know their names, but I don’t know what we did together, and I don’t know if I escaped them.
Maybe they were cruel to me. My memories don’t suggest that, but they’re very partial, and I know each and every one of these mates is capable of inflicting incredible pain.
I get up and leave the room, following the low rumble of alien voices.
Kronos, Boss, and Sharp are having a little meeting about me in the ship’s galley. From the snippets I catch up front, I guess they must have decided to come in here and talk about me like I’m a thing they own while I slept.
They really don’t see me like they see themselves. I’m not an entire separate person to them. I’m a thing. An intelligent, sexually attractive thing, but still a thing.
“We’re going to start over with her. It could be an opportunity. We could fix some of the mistakes we made the first time around. We know her tricks now, and she doesn’t know them. That’s quite an advantage,” Sharp is saying.
I don’t love his tactical tone. Sounds like I am about to get my ass manipulated. Though if they keep monologuing their plans this way I guess I can stay ahead of this.
I’m so confused. Yesterday I was an amnesiac drug dealer, today I’m a slightly less amnesiac human pet to three aliens who intend to force me to obey them in every way and fuck me and…
half the problem is these men are so fucking attractive, that doesn’t sound like the worst thing that could happen to me.
What do I want?
I can’t know what I want without remembering who I am and what happened to me. Amnesia is a bitch because it strips the future as much as it takes the past. It’s hard to be a person without context.
I sneak away from their conversation, realizing that this is the first chance I’ve had to explore the ship.
It’s quite… nice? Quite homey, in a way.
Hard to explain exactly why. It’s not exactly pretty.
It’s more… familiar? It must have changed from the first time I was here.
It doesn’t look like the inside of a gimp suit anymore. Did I get them to redecorate?
The deja is vuing hard.
I’ve had this feeling before in the past, when I’m around something I know I should remember, but don’t.
It feels unsettling, especially combined with their conversation about how they’re going to start training me all over from the beginning.
I don’t feel like being trained. Being fucked is one thing.
But having to actually obey? No, thank you.
Okay. I’m starting to get my head together a little more. I know I want my memories back, and I don’t think hanging around getting gangbanged by aliens is going to do that—even though that’s actually been surprisingly effective so far.
On my way through the ship, I pick up a few things. Nothing large, just stuff that looks like it might be worth money once I get back to NNYC. Am I going back to Earth? I guess. There’s an instinct in every animal to go home. It’s baked in. Even if home is dangerous or destroyed.
I feel a little guilty about this, but my main instinct is to escape. They’re hot, but they’re obviously not planning on giving me anything fucking resembling a choice of what happens to me.
I can hear my mates discussing me as I go. They have low voices that rumble through the plating of the ship’s hull, so I know they’re not onto me or what I am doing yet.
I find my clothes, too. That’s good. I put them on, and I sling my bag across my body. It’s still absolutely packed with drugs, which will be useful pretty much anywhere.
Eventually, after a few minutes of rifling through the place and taking the good stuff, I find myself at a door marked: Escape
I can’t not open it, obviously.
There’s a small shuttle inside. An escape pod. I guess it’s for if the ship is deciding it’s not going to be a ship anymore. Critical emergencies, vicious attacks, leaks in the hull, stuff like that. Also, humans who don’t want to be pets.
I get in it, just to see how it feels. It’s sort of the size of a very small car. I put my feet up on the dash, just for a second.
I hear something click. Something else hums. There’s a whirr. And then pod and I fall out of the belly of the ship.
“Oh, no,” I say quietly, to myself, because nobody else is here to listen.
I pull my feet off the controls and replace them with my hands.
This doesn’t really help all that much, because I don’t know how to fly an escape pod.
I don’t even know if you can fly an escape pod, or if the pod just sort of… escapes of its own accord.
What I do know is that the pod is hurtling through space at a trajectory very different from the original ship.
I wonder if they’ve noticed that I’m gone.
I wonder if an alarm sounds, or if the designers figured it would be best for the inhabitants of the ship not to notify their enemies if they were escaping them in the case of a boarding or something.
It all really comes down to if the ship is designed to hold people prisoner, or help the users escape.
Before I can get my bearings, or even begin to work out how I might pilot this panicked orb, a flash of light bursts across my vision.
It is bright enough to force my eyes to close for a moment.
When they open again, another ship is taking up a surprising amount of the sky.
It is bright red and has a number of razor-like protrusions.
Basically looks like someone went to a catalog and picked out a bad guy ship for bad guys.
I have a deep sense of unease looking at it, as if something is about to go horribly wrong.
Of course, that could be a false positive, because a lot of things have already gone wrong.
I’ve been abducted from Earth by three aliens and now I’m in a speeding vessel I can’t control.
The big red ship with the razors seems to be following the mercenaries’ ship.
I get the sense it’s been there for a while, maybe not occupying exactly the same physical space, but aware of their location somehow.
“Fuck,” I curse to myself. “That can’t be good.”
It’s not good. And then it gets worse.
Several smaller vessels split off from that ship and follow my pod. They close the distance between the red ship and me, giving me the feeling of being helpless inside a tin can. Sitting ducks have a thousand times more maneuverability than I do in this moment.
I start grabbing controls and hitting buttons. The escape orb jerks violently to my left, then starts spinning in circles so fast, the only reason I’m not ill is the fact centrifugal force won’t let anything leave my stomach.
I try pushing the only lever forward, assuming that probably makes the thing go faster, but then I realize it’s more like a joystick, like this is an oversized interstellar paddle boat.
Pew! Pew! The smaller ships start firing at me. Bright flashes of light zip by my bulbous orb. I’m going to have a really great view of the bolt that smashes me into a thousand pieces and then gets each of those pieces instantly freeze-dried in deep space.
“What the fuck! I have nothing to do with this!” I shout. “Leave me alone!”
But they don’t leave me alone. I don’t know if they think I’m hostile, or if they’re just hunting me for sport.
It’s really hard to tell. With the way they appeared so quickly after the escape pod left the ship, I feel like they got some kind of notification that had happened.
Why? I don’t know. How? I know that even less.
I yank and jerk at the stick in front of me, trying to get away from the alien ships. They seem to only be able to fire directly in front of them, which is the only saving grace I can see. If these fuckers could hit me at an angle, I’d be a thin smear of atoms.
I hit a button on the dash.
“Stop! I’m just a girl!”
I hear my voice outside the ship, which shouldn’t be possible because space is a vacuum, but maybe the vacuum missed a few spots and left some dust or something to transmit the sound because I can sense the vibrations of my message traveling from my vessel to theirs.
There’s a beat or two, and then a voice comes back to me. It sounds metallic and supercilious, like it’s emerging from someone who considers the act of murdering me to be beneath them somehow.
“You’re a hostile actor, defecting from a mercenary ship. Surrender to justice immediately!”
“I don’t know how to surrender! Can you give me instructions?”
“Humans,” the voice snipes over the speakers. “Always thinking they are special for no particular reason. Always imagining they are the exception to any given rule. Do as you are told, female, or suffer the consequences.”
“I’m in an escape pod and I don’t know how to fly it!”
“You’ve been running evasive maneuvers this whole time.”
“That was luck! You have to believe me.”