ALIEN STORY-3
Written by Ruthless
The sight of the creatures on the hijacker’s communicator screen was a shock like a wave of thunder in my head. Darloxians. Well, to whom else should a man who had declared war on his own species go to for comfort and counsel? The Darloxians are not at war with the human race. They are a strange ugly, species, in some areas technologically backward, which keep to themselves and observe the treaties that bind our races to peace. But the trade missions are few, there was certainly no extradition agreement, nor could it be said that they are friends to our species. I knew very little more about Darloxians than that.
It may be that I am xenophobic, that of all the trades in the vibrant, diverse culture of the Interstellar Empire, I chose to study human history. I have a gift for languages, but I turned it to the dead languages of my own race, shunning the fricatives and sibilances of alien mouths. My eyes retained the after image of the Darloxian I had seen on the screen. I find it hard to appreciate the aesthetics of other intelligent species. The sight of the Darloxian repulsed me in a way that clenched me down to my viscera. They were so ugly!
My captor had slung his gun again. He took out a knife. He smiled. His narrow lips curved. Again I faced him. I felt the knifepoint against my shoulder. It moved, a thin lick of pain tracing through my jacket as it sawed. He was cutting the rope that tied me to the seat. I stayed sitting still. The knife moved deliberately, behind me nicking into the places where the rope was taut, circling me. When he stepped back the rope was still tight about my wrists, but slackly looped about my ankles.
“Get up, Iver.”
I stood. I was clumsy, off-balance and hobbled by the ropes that trailed loosely about my boots. He motioned me to step forward towards him. He held the curved knife in his hand so that he was gesturing me wordlessly to approach it. I took one clumsy step, almost a hop towards the knife.
His free hand lunged out. The dancer’s grace had an athlete’s speed behind it. He took me by the hair, fist clenching above my forehead where I keep it long. He pulled my head down and forward. He wrenched so hard that he was tugging at my scalp. I could almost feel the skin lifting. He started to back up and with his grip on me, I had to follow him, however awkwardly.
The rope slithered after me like a child’s trailing toy. I could not take real steps. Somehow I scuffed after him. The pull on my hair had brought spontaneous tears of pain into my eyes. I could not use my arms for balance because they were held together behind my back. I stumbled into the airlock with him. He pushed me up against the wall. Now we were face to face and he was laughing down at me. Soundlessly, with his face screwed up, he laughed. He didn’t let go of my hair and he didn’t put away the knife.
When the lock opened he dragged me shuffling small step after shuffling step into a slippery wide square passage. It was humid. I felt at once an oppressive weight. He did not seem to feel it. I knew now why the terrorist was so strong and moved so lightly. The gravity on the Darloxian ship was greater than earth normal. He was accustomed to it. The Terran normal gravity on the space launch had felt light for him. But I was not accustomed to Darloxian gravity, and although it was only perhaps thirty percent more than Terran normal, I felt suddenly like weights had been placed on my shoulders and hung from my arms.
The white floor was like glass. The inevitable happened. I lost my balance and went down. But I went down only to one knee because I tried to catch myself and because he kept his grip on my hair. I felt it rip from the roots. His knuckles were digging into my head. My breath was leaving me in explosive gasps from the difficulty of trying to walk like that, but my fall made things easier. When I went down I kicked and the rope around my ankles gave way. It was in a wide loop when I got back to my feet again. By the time we reached the door at the end of the passage, I had stepped out of it.
Darren, -I knew the hijacker’s name by now from the Super Vision broadcast that he had watched so avidly- flung me up against a wall again. This time he turned his attention to the Darloxians. There were four great wide-jawed aliens in the room and they turned their round bulging eyes on me.
“How do you like that!” Darren exclaimed to them. “We’ve got another passenger, a human hostage. Look at the little fucker!”
The Darloxians made me so frightened that my breath stuck. Even in that moment confronted with the xenophobic shock of the sight of their bulky tall figures so close to me, I wondered why the man was speaking English instead of the alien language. I had never seen Darloxians in the flesh before, only in pictures when I studied the chapter devoted to them in my High School stellography book, and the rare image that had flashed on my super vision screen.
They were massive. Each one was a couple of heads taller than humans are. They were sand-coloured with wrinkly fitting skin that bagged around them like outsized clothing. They were naked. All that they wore were several half-empty equipment bags, which dangled around their big abdomens. Their limbs and tentacles seemed loosely jointed so that they hung slackly below the slopping shoulders. I even saw their big floppy penises and scrotal sacs. Every thing seemed pendulous about the bullet heads and great round abdomens. Only the wide webbed feet seemed firmly braced.
The Darloxian answered him in the same language, sounding surprised. Its voice was shrill and sharp. “You want to keep this human one alive?”
The easy smile twisted Darren’s lips. “Hell, I don’t want him alive! I just brought him along for the ride. If you want to eat him, you just go right ahead.”
For a moment the bulging eyes all turned to the terrorist. “Never have we eaten human flesh before. It is an experiment to consider.” Then the eyes turned again to me. I stared back appalled. They made no move to close in. I was like a puzzle that intrigued them. They were in no hurry to begin solving it as they considered me.
“We better get the goods out of the life boat, Neaf.” Said the terrorist. “The sooner we can get them both under wraps the better.”
“We shall attend to it immediately.” The Darloxian who had thus far spoken said. He spoke an order, in English still to two of the other Darloxians. They left the chamber, their huge feet slapping on the floor.
“No telling if they’ve got a trace on the lifeboat, or even tampered with the autodoc.” Darren said tensely. “I made a check but it was a quick one.”
“It can be taken care of.” The Darloxian assured him.
“Yeah? We can’t really tell if the autodoc has been tampered with until we use it. All it would take is a few settings in the programming being changed and that thing will kill instead of doing its work. I wouldn’t be able to tell by inspecting it. It would take a surgeon-programmer.”
“Then we will find a human in need of surgery to test it on.” Neaf, the Darloxian concluded.
For a moment the man locked eyes with the larger alien. They seemed to exchange a thought. Darren inhaled sharply. He didn’t speak of what they were thinking. His hand came up and he tapped the front of his chest, in a nervous gesture that was unusual so it caught my attention. It was like he was reassuring himself, perhaps checking to see if he had a heart still inside his chest. He looked all around himself. There was even a muscle in his face jumping. The marks of fatigue were visible on his face.
“You look after the lifeboat for now.” Said the hijacker. “We’ll deal with the autodoc later, okay?”
“Whatever you prefer, Darren.” The alien replied.
“I’ve gotta go take a rest.” Darren looked about, his darting gaze taking me in as it once more traveled about the cabin in the Darloxian ship. “Where can I put this little fuck, store him until we’ve got a chance to get rid of him? Got any pressurized storage holds he can be locked up in?”
“Any hold will suffice.” The Darloxian stirred as if he was about to raise his tentacles and I realized that the gesture was a shrug, the imitation of a human mannerism coming out in an unnatural motion that made the wrinkles below the creatures chinless head pronounced. “What about the hold beside the one that we fixed up as a cabin for you?”
Darren nodded. “Good. Put him there. That’s alright.”
He moved swiftly. He was in a hurry to leave. Even so as he darted out of the room his look paused on me again and he frowned. I was defenseless against his anger and scorn and hatred. It made me want to shrink away.
When the man was gone, the Darloxians moved closer to me. I pressed myself flat against the wall. It was not Neaf but the other Darloxian that came closest. Its mouth was a gash and the mouth opened. The hijacker had told them they could eat me. He had also told them to put me into a storage hold, but I remember how he had casually offered to let them consume me and I looked horrified up at the wide lipless maw.
The Darloxian spoke. The husky scraping noise that was its speech was brief and utterly incomprehensible to me.
“In English, Hurluck.” The Darloxian named Neaf corrected him.
“You don’t like Darloxians, Human?” The alien’s voice came out rough when it spoke in my language.
“You’re… big.” I had almost no voice.
“You’re small!” It exclaimed.
One of the tentacles came forward. It was reaching down in front of my heaving chest. I felt a light contact through my shirt but the tentacle went lower. To my horror the tentacle stopped at the level of my crotch. It had to be a coincidence, I thought, because that was about as far down as the thick muscular probe could extend without stretching.
“Chthri-Darren says he wants another man to be with.” The Darloxian told me. “He needs other men to talk, to touch, to have.”
The pressure of the blunt tentacle on my crotch made me gasp out loud with pain. It was pushing relentlessly inward and my testicles were being crushed by the jabbing end. My mouth opened wide. I could not back any farther. I could not move to either side. Instead, I rose up on tiptoe to avoid the push. I almost howled. I evade the pushing tentacle but the end of it slid below my balls, scraping them, pushing between my legs. The relief was brief. The Darloxian began to push upwards.
“UnnnhhHH!” This time I did vocalize my pain. The creature was strong. My back slithered up the wall as it levered me up into the air. My feet left the ground. It held me uncomfortably astride the end of its tentacle with my balls being mashed back against me.
“Chthri-Darren says that he wants a man to make pleasure from.” The Darloxian was speaking right into my face. We were almost eye to eye it had lifted me so far from the ground. “He wants this. It is a very interesting idea.”
Then the Darloxian released me. One instant its tentacle was there. The next instant it had pulled it away and there was nothing holding me in midair. I dropped.
I fell heavily to the floor, rolling to my face, the breath knocked out of me. Pain was shooting through me from my crushed balls. Groaning, I brought my knees up under me. I was almost lying on the Darloxian’s big webbed foot. If my wrists had not been tied behind my back, I would have brought them forward to cup around myself.
I had barely gotten the groan under control before the Darloxian grabbed me again. This time it grabbed me by the foot. It stooped. The longest tentacle wrapped around my ankle. I was dragged. The smooth white floor slid under me.
It was the Darloxian Neaf who intervened. I don’t know what that Darloxian would have done. It was only dragging me across the floor. Perhaps it would have simply dragged me down the corridor of the space ship. But Neaf stopped him, lifted me with two tentacles about my ribcage, and although I flinched and heaved away in fear, Neaf stood me on my feet again.
“Darren has not said you must die yet.” Neaf said. His voice was surprisingly human. He modulated it more skillfully than the other Darloxians that I had heard speaking English. ‘So you will be kept, as Darren wishes.”
I went where the huge Darloxian made me walk. It was not far. There was a small room with no internal control panel. A light glow in one wall, otherwise apart from the door the room was featureless and unfurnished. He made me go in here. It was the storeroom. And when I was inside, the door was sealed and the aliens left me alone to my fear and my desperation.
The End of Part 3
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