The creature looked at her stoically, looking for all the world like an oversized, unkempt human man in an Old Earth film, waiting patiently for his wife to finish babbling.
Then, without saying anything, it calmly wrapped its hands around her wrists and pinned them behind her back. She offered no resistance; having already tested the creature’s physical strength while thrown over its knee, she knew she couldn’t overcome him.
A moment later her hands were bound.
The creature stepped back and looked at her. She had to remind herself that it wasn’t human, and so its expressions could not be interpreted as human. The fact that it looked apologetic was meaningless.
“It is for your own good,” he said, surprising her.
Her eyes darted to the others. She was helpless against the strength of the creature, so this symbolic display of her helplessness should not have been as devastating as it was. But with her hands tied behind her back, her erect nipples thrust forward as a result, and no way to cover herself or prevent them from seeing the moisture dribbling down her thigh, she was totally vulnerable.
They could do anything they wanted to her.
The thought, unbidden, surfaced in her consciousness and—to her dismay—sharpened her arousal. Her thighs were soaked. Her sex was hot. Her nipples stood stiff as pebbles at the peaks of her breasts.
“Do you require us still, Rychor?” one of the creatures asked. Back to English again. Buthow?
“Rysbur and Cenah, stay behind. The rest of you are dismissed.”
She watched in a stupor as all but two of the creatures shuffled through a tunnel in the cave they were in. Only then did she get a better view of her surroundings. Streams of water bubbled all around her. Rocky outcrops spiked into the cavern, all bathed in that pale blue light she’d first seen.
They were underground. They must exist underground, the planet up top being too hostile for life. That explained the disappearance of the crew, and the strange signals that had led them to explore the planet in the first place. But everything else was a mystery.
It dawned on her then—the magnitude of what she’d discovered. Not just life, not just the process that caused trees and plants to grow, insects to pollinate and animals to procreate. These were sentient beings. Beings who could communicate, miraculously, in her own language. A technologically advanced civilization, with a social structure easily as complex as humanity’s.
And what had happened in her first contact? Nothing she would have ever predicted. Yet this was precisely what she had been trained to expect: the unexpected. She had always believed that would involve finding intelligent life in a strange form, based on a different element than carbon, or living on a timescale so much different than humanity’s own that they would be impossible to forge a connection with.
She hadn’t ever entertained the idea that humanoid aliens wouldspankher right off the bat. Or be so overtly engaged in what was, to her, a sexual ritual, right away.
Suddenly, she had an idea, and it buoyed her spirits: maybe this wasn’t sexual to these creatures at all.
But then, what was it? And how would they react to her arousal, which was on display for any of them to see?
The creature—had they called him Rychor?—stepped around in front of her again. His eyes moved over her body, and Sonya thought she saw in them the same inquisitive drive that lived inside her. She watched him: he seemed to be analyzing, not engaging in a sexual ritual.
But who could know what they were thinking? Their artificial intelligence was sophisticated enough to learn a whole language from a different species—not just a different language family—in no time at all, and communicate effectively with it. This creature could be thinkinganything.Was it trying to analyze her, or something else?
He pulled a pen-like device from out of the wrap around his waist and pressed it against her chest, just beneath her clavicle, before pushing the button on the end. He did this so quickly and unexpectedly, she did not have time to even ponder it until it was already done.
She sucked in a sharp breath at the momentary pain—sharp enough to make her eyes water, but almost instantly gone, like the burn of wasabi. She looked down. The device had burned two glyphs into her skin. She looked up at Rychor again. “What…?”
“That is your specimen identification,” he said, pocketing the pen. There was a moment of uncomfortable silence as Sonya processed the term “specimen” and began listing the implications in her mind.
Then Rychor—she needed to think of him as a creature with a name—put a hand on her arm. His touch was surprisingly gentle, his skin warm and dry. The sensation of his hand on her skin was thrilling. A shiver traveled over her flesh, leaving goosebumps in its wake, and she felt certain her heart rate had accelerated.
All things the creature noticed. His eyes darted from one patch of goosebumps to the other, following the back of her forearm to her shoulder, peering around her to see her bump-laced back.
“The temperature is within a range that other humans have stated is comfortable,” he said. “You exhibit signs of hypothermia.” His eyes stopped on her nipples.
Sonya’s mouth fell open. She was the sort of person who had to stop herself from correcting every inaccurate piece of information that came out of people’s mouths.
“Hypo… hype… hypothermia is a medical condition,” she croaked, her voice suddenly hoarse. “In which the actual body temperature goes below—”
“I have spoken incorrectly. You exhibit signs of discomfort related to the temperature.”
Sonya’s face grew red. She could feel the color rising in her cheeks. “It isn’t the…” She shook her head rapidly, suddenly not wanting to have to explain that she was not hypothermic, or even cold, but sexually aroused.
“You exhibit signs of overheating now. Are you experiencing a temperature regulation problem that can be resolved?”
