Cosmic Captain: Chapter 5

I knew where I was the moment I opened my eyes. Everything around me was blurry, but it was clearly some sort of steel, sterile environment. When I tried to move, my limbs didn’t respond, and I knew I was suspended in midair like last time. Paralyzed like last time. Spread eagled with my arms and legs bound by metal cuffs like last time. Jaw locked open, just like last time.

Then an extraterrestrial filled my vision, hovering over my face, and I would throw up if my throat muscles worked on their own. Vague memories of how they looked turned sharp and clear in the face of the creature in front of me. It—he, I was pretty sure—was tall and lithe with light grayish skin that looked…smoother than a human’s. And he stared at me with two, horrible sets of unblinking black eyes. They were all almond shaped, the primary ones sitting in the same place on his face as human eyes. There were smaller ones directly underneath, bracketing a rather flat nose. His thin lips downturned into a frown when he looked at me, and a tremor of fear went through my body.

I couldn’t make any other movement happen.

“We’ve taken this one before. It tried to remove its chip.” His voice startled me, and even more so that I could understand it. I remembered the first time, and how all their language had sounded weird and clicky—unintelligible. Did the chip act as a translator of sorts? It must have, because their words still sounded strange, but I just knew what they meant now.

It also didn’t escape me that they were speaking of me as an it.

But I could take deep breaths. I’d experienced all this before, I could push it all to the back of my mind and when they eventually sent me home I’d have the proof I needed. I’d be able to move on knowing it was all true.

Or could I? Could I be satisfied just knowing I was right? Or would I need the world to know? Panic rose as I wondered what happened to people who were abducted twice. I’d been so stupid trying to see them again and what if they didn’t let me go? What if they killed me?

“Which means we put it back the first time too. Why bother with it again?” A voice came from somewhere south of me, but I couldn’t tilt my head forward to look. I was woefully aware that I was stark naked, and the knowledge that another extraterrestrial I couldn’t see was standing between my legs while I was exposed was horrifying.

White hot fear flooded my system as I realized I’d have to go through it all again. The touching, the exploring, the cleaning—

“Boss said maybe we were wrong the first time. It might be desirable.” The one peering at my face spoke again, and all my fearful thoughts stuttered to a stop.

Might be desirable. Wheels were spinning, clicking pieces into place. They’d let me go the first time because, in some way, I hadn’t been what they wanted. And they were going to check again. They were going to check again and if I fit their standards they would keep me.

Fuck, fuck, fuck!

What had I done? What had I been thinking? Tears began to leak down my face as the full situation settled on me. I’d been so stupid, when I could have done my best to get back to living, back to a normal life on Earth. But maybe whatever had deterred them before would deter them again. They’d send me back, they had to.

“Always crying, the humans.” The alien between my legs tsked. Then what felt like a gloved hand flicked my flaccid cock, and I couldn’t even react to the pain or the violation of the touch. “This is probably why we didn’t keep it. The harsa didn’t work.”

I didn’t know what harsa was, but I could guess.

The black-eyed creature above me shrugged—such a human gesture. “There’s some new stuff on the market we could try. I don’t think it’s a deal breaker.”

Please, please let it be a deal breaker. I didn’t want to be here, I wanted to go home. And wondered if they’d taken Derrick as well, if he was going through the very same thing I was. I hoped not. I hoped if he was, that he was found unsatisfactory too. Knowing that I put him in more danger than I could have ever imagined brought on more tears, and I despised that I couldn’t even move my tongue yet I was able to cry. It seemed cruel and intentional.

Panic rose in my chest as the alien above me pulled a tube from somewhere off to the side and positioned it above my mouth. This was the part I remembered ever so clearly, and I knew the alien between my legs was going to put another one in my anus. My body trembled to the best of its ability, but my jaw couldn’t close and my legs were split apart.

I tried to scream as the tubes went in, as the one in my mouth got shoved all the way down to my stomach despite how hard my throat tried to gag. And then my insides were lighting up with searing pain as I was filled with horrible liquids.

That chemical smell that had burned my nostrils the first time and had remained so prominently in my memories filled my nose again, and two sets of hands were spreading cool liquid all over my skin. The sticky stuff began to itch, then to burn, and I could do nothing but bear it with useless tears running down my face.

This had been a mistake. A horrible, terrible mistake.

When I woke up, I was in some form of cell. My entire body ached and my skin was tender to the touch. It was as if they’d scoured my body clean inside and out. A hard shudder ran through my body when I remembered how many drugs they’d tried to use to give me an erection, and what they’d done when one finally worked. If I didn’t feel so violated and humiliated, I’d say it was purely clinical. I’d take some form of comfort in the fact that their hands had barely touched me at all and everything had been done by machines.

As it was, those thoughts were no solace.

I was still naked, though thankfully not hard anymore, but when I tried to look around, my head just spun. It was slowly sinking in that I wasn’t in a jail cell on Earth because they thought I was just some passed out drunk like last time. Once I got the world to stop spinning, I saw the cold, clinical silver hallway of a spaceship though the bars of my cell.

The fact that there were metal bars for a cell on an alien spaceship seemed a bit ordinary, honestly. Until I thought about it some more and realized a good old lock and key wasn’t something that could be hacked or overridden. In a world of clearly advanced technology, it was probably way more secure to lock people behind bars.

And I was fixating.

My mind was drifting to distract from the fact that I wasn’t back on Earth, which meant these extraterrestrials had decided to keep me. Oh fuck, they were keeping me. Panic shortened my breath to quick gasps, and I doubled over on my knees to throw up. No food came out, just a thick liquid that looked like a mix of stomach bile and something white and foamy. The harsh chemical smell of it made me scramble backwards, pressing my hands to my throat to try and keep from vomiting again.

I needed to find Derrick. Or rather, I needed to find out if they’d kept him and then we would figure out a way to escape together. After all that stupid desperation to know the truth, I’d give anything to just go home and pretend it never happened. To live an ignorant life on Earth where extraterrestrials weren’t real and they didn’t do awful things to people like me.

And that stupid fake tooth in my mouth that could record sounds was pretty useless if I wasn’t on my own planet.

What was in store for me beyond this? What did they do with humans they kept? My imagination ran wild with ideas, the simplest of which being that they’d keep me and study me. Find out what made me tick. Wasn’t that the theory? Though as I approached the bars and dared a look around at what seemed like a high tech facility, I wasn’t so sure.

A sort of lab was visible through a glass window across the sterile hallway, and I could make out lots of equipment that I couldn’t place any familiarity on. Nothing like lab equipment on Earth. If aliens were truly so advanced, what did they need to study humans for? Maybe for a little bit, it made sense, but over time I felt they would have gathered enough data or lost interest.

I didn’t think I was here as a lab rat.

They’d spent hours trying to find a drug that would give me an erection, and I had a sinking feeling that played heavily into why they’d kept me. One of those aliens with the four black eyes appeared around the corner of the hallway wearing a dark green coat that shone in the bright lights like it could be water resistant. Black gloves were on his hands, and he didn’t seem so different from a regular person in a lab coat.

I skittered away from the bars, backing into a far corner of the cell when I realized the alien—had I disliked that term before?—was headed straight for me. He studied my curled up form for a moment, expression unreadable, before placing a tray on the ground and sliding it through the narrow gap underneath the bars.

Even when he left without a word, I couldn’t bring myself to move from the corner, body shaking with fear. I’d barely realized I was panicking until short, heaving breaths were puffing out of me as I trembled uncontrollably. But there was no comfort here, no kind words or warm embrace. I had to take care of myself.

With great effort, I started sucking in deep breaths, forcing the air in and out of my lungs until I’d calmed a bit. When I was shaking slightly less, I crawled on hands and knees to where the tray was resting on the floor. It was as cold and silver and sterile as the rest of the place, housing one metal cup of water and a matching metal bowl of…something. A blue sort of slop—like grits or porridge, on looks alone.

They’d given me no utensils to eat with, and since I refused to believe a supposedly advanced species didn’t use utensils to eat, I assumed they’d done it on purpose. To make me feel like an animal. And maybe in their eyes I was. An animal that needed to be quarantined and thoroughly sterilized, I realized. The horrific chemicals they’d used in and out of my body had nothing to do with study and everything to do with making ridding me of any feral diseases.

Like an exotic pet.

Everything about alien abductions finally made sense, and I despised that it did. That humans on Earth had no idea what they were dealing with. That everything we’d thought had been wrong. This wasn’t study or fascination or torture.

This was a slave trade.