Chola and Seki
Parts One and Two
by Leem

January 2006: Copyright © 2006 by Leem

This story may be posted on other sites provided that Leem is identified as the author and that no unauthorised changes are made to the text.

The first part of this story appeared quite a few moons ago in the Pygmalion Group’s Female Stories section, under the title “Chola’s Story Part One: Defiance”. I didn’t consider it complete enough to post anywhere else until I’d finished Part Two, which obviously I now have.

There will be at least another two parts, but at the time of writing I still had several details to work out before getting around to actually writing them.

Part One: Defiance

“Surrender your ship. We do not kill.”

It was hard to tell if that was meant as a threat or a reassurance. The aliens’ translator spoke in a grating mechanical monotone that was just barely comprehensible as it was.

We’d heard that alien raiders were operating in this sector, but we blithely assumed they’d only go after the big ships and leave our little cruiser alone.

According to the reports, several ships had been raided and neither they nor their crews had been heard of again. That didn’t bode well for Seki and me.

“Gods, Chola, look at the size of that ship,” said Seki. “We don’t stand a chance. Can’t we outrun it?”

“If only we could,” I replied. “The engines are dead. The aliens are jamming the injectors somehow.”

A huge hatch opened in the side of the alien vessel, revealing a cavernous hold filled with what might have been other raided ships. The aliens matched velocities with us as the hatch came alongside, then manoeuvred sideways so that the hold swallowed us. Seki and I began to drift as our artificial gravity cut out, and then fell back in our seats as it was replaced by the aliens’. Our ship fell several cubits to the deck, jarring us in our seats.

The gigantic hatch closed with a resounding clang, audible through the hull in the absence of an atmosphere. Then there was nothing to do but wait for the raiding party to arrive.

Seki looked at me and swallowed.

“Chola,” she said, voice trembling, “even... even if they’re telling the truth about letting us live... there’s no telling what they might do to us. They might rape us, enslave us, torture us...”

I longed to be able to give her some kind of reassurance, but the truth was that I had come to a similar conclusion myself.

Tears streaming down her face, she said, “Chola, we should kill ourselves.”

That had also been running through my mind, but it was still a horrible shock to hear her say it.

“Quickly, Chola, before they get here. We’ll take an overdose from the med unit, or grab hold of a high-voltage terminal while we still have internal power, or just blow the hatch before the aliens’ hold pressurises.”

I swallowed. I couldn’t see for tears.

“I can’t,” I sobbed. “I’m sorry, Seki. I just can’t do it. I’m a coward. I... I can’t watch you die.”

We embraced each other fiercely.

“Well, then that makes me a coward too,” she whispered. “I love you, Chola.”

“I love you, Seki.”

We were still embracing when the aliens arrived. Three of them forced the hatch and strode on board. They were wearing what looked like pressure suits, which made it impossible to tell what their faces looked like - or even if they had faces.

The suits were over six cubits high, which meant they had to crouch low while moving through our small ship, and had four arms apiece with a versatile array of manipulators attached to each one. Versatile enough, anyhow, to separate and restrain Seki and me.

Of course, for all we knew the suits might have been some kind of exoskeletal armour. The creatures that wore them might have been tiny weaklings. There was just no way to tell.

“Emotional attachment,” grated the alien translator. I couldn’t tell which of the aliens was using it. “This has been observed in previous encounters with your species. A possible survival trait, but one having no relevance here.”

“What do you want with us?” I demanded, trying to sound as angrily authoritative as I could.

“Technology. Materials. Anything of potential value. This excludes yourselves.”

“So what are you going to do to us?” cried Seki. “Were you lying when you said you wouldn’t kill us?”

“We speak only truth,” said the alien. “The code does not allow us to kill inferior species. You will merely be rendered harmless.”

Neither of us liked the sound of that.

“What do you mean, ‘harmless’?” said Seki.

“You will learn in a very short time. You are to be processed immediately.”

The aliens stripped us and carried us out of our ship. I’ll say this for them: they were methodical. They spent some time analysing how our clothes were fastened, and then used those manipulators of theirs to deftly unfasten and remove them, garment by garment. In spite of our struggling, I don’t think they tore a single seam. I suppose they wanted the garments intact in case they had any trade value. I had a vision of some multi-tentacled creature attempting to wear my ship suit and couldn’t help chuckling, despite being carried naked through the bowels of an alien spacecraft.

Finally we arrived in a small chamber occupied by another of the pressure-suited aliens.

“Biochemical analysis begins,” croaked the translator.

We felt a slight tingling sensation as scanning devices slid up and down in front of our bodies. Then they were removed and the new alien announced, “Analysis complete. Species confirmed. Introducing restrainers.”

A featureless metal cylinder slid out of a wall opening. The alien took it and approached Seki, who tried in vain to struggle against the alien that was holding her.

The alien pressed the cylinder against her stomach, waited a moment, and then gestured to the other alien, which released her. Seki took a step forward, and then her eyes widened in alarm as her legs stiffened, and the stiffness quickly spread to the rest of her body.

“Chola!” she screamed. “My legs! I can’t... oh, gods... Chola... I’m... para... lysed! Chola... I... lo....”

A moment later she was completely stiff.

I could only watch in horror as my lover stood helpless as a doll, her arms frozen in the act of reaching out to me.

And then it was my turn. The alien pressed the cylinder to my abdomen and there was a brief sensation of pressure. Nanomachines, I guessed, self-replicating and capable of being programmed for a specific task; in this case, immobilising humans.

I knew I only had moments left. As my captor let me go I leapt forward crying, “I love... you... too... Se... ki...!”

A moment later speech was already impossible. I had hoped to be able to lean forward and kiss Seki one last time, but my body was already stiffening. I was becoming frozen faster than Seki had. No doubt the nanomachines in Seki’s body had transmitted information about human anatomy to those in mine, enabling them to act more efficiently.

With an enormous effort I was able to raise my hand to Seki’s face and place my fingertips gently against her cheek. An instant later the nanomachines completed their work and I stood helplessly inanimate, gazing into her eyes. Equally helpless, she gazed back.

We were trapped. We might remain this way forever, and there was no telling what our captors might do to us while we were.

Yet we had won a small victory over the aliens. My last free act had been a gesture of love.

Part Two: Chola’s Repose

The aliens examined us carefully, as if to make sure we really were paralysed. They needn’t have worried; their nanomachines were doing their job with terrible efficiency. Seki and I were flesh and blood statues, fully conscious and sensate.

I was terrified of what they might do to us now that we were helpless, but as it turned out my fears were groundless. They didn’t do anything to us. After a few minutes they just walked out and left us, in that drab grey chamber in their drab grey spaceship.

Time passed with no way to measure it. There was nothing we could do except stare into each other’s eyes. Thanks to the nanomachines I felt no hunger or thirst, except my body’s endless, yearning hunger for Seki’s touch.

At least we were together. At least we still had each other. I’d almost be content to remain here forever as long as we were together.

For a long time it seemed that was just what would happen. Staring wistfully into each other’s eyes hour after hour eventually seemed to induce a kind of hypnotic state in which I only had the vaguest notion of the passage of time. It might have been a moon or a decade before the aliens finally came for us.

There were two of them. Each of them unceremoniously picked one of us up and carried us out of the room. My trance was instantly broken, and as I was carried through the drab grey corridors I could only hope and pray that whatever they were going to do to us would involve keeping us together.

After a few minutes we were carried into a nondescript grey room that looked just like all the others except for a strange piece of apparatus that stood at its centre. It was a small transparent chamber that looked like a shower cabinet, except for the thick grey cables with which it was festooned.

One of the aliens spoke, and the grating metallic voice translated once more.

“As we stated earlier, we are forbidden to kill inferior life forms such as yourselves. Therefore we have found a planet whose environment will not kill you and we shall leave you there. Our responsibility to you under the code will thus come to a welcome end.”

The irony was overwhelming. An inhabitable planet, almost certainly undiscovered by humanity. If we’d found it we could have been rich and famous. Instead of which, we were just going to be dumped on it naked and paralysed, to be bitten by the local bugs and crapped on by the local animals for god knew how many centuries or millennia until the nanomachines finally broke down.

Maybe, just maybe, when that day finally came we would at last be freed from our paralysis and allowed to live out the rest of our natural lifespans together. Until then...there was literally nothing we could do but wait and pray that when the nanos did break down mine and Seki’s would do so simultaneously. If they didn’t, one of us might be restored to mobility, grow old and die while the other remained young and helpless... though at least still capable of being caressed.

If that was to be our fate, maybe it would have been better to have killed ourselves. But speculation was futile. I couldn’t imagine what the new planet would be like.

And how exactly did the aliens plan to send us there? We weren’t in a shuttle bay.

I soon had my answer. The alien that was carrying Seki walked over to the cabinet and stuffed her into it, placing her back against the opposite window and bending her knees so that when the door closed she was sitting in a cramped and claustrophobic position.

I had already guessed what the cabinet was, and my suspicions were confirmed when the alien pressed some buttons and turned a couple of sparky knobs on a nearby panel. Electricity crackled and hummed. My hair felt as if it was standing on end. A jarring mechanical whine rose in pitch until it was painful to my ears. At the same time the interior of the cabinet was filled with an eerie green glow that soon covered Seki’s paralysed body. The glow became brighter and brighter until Seki could no longer be seen, and then there was a blinding flash and the whining noise died away.

It took a moment for my eyes to recover, but once they did I was not surprised to see that the cabinet was empty. Seki was gone. The cabinet was a matter transporter.

Human scientists had spent decades trying to perfect a transporter system, but had been forced to concede that while the process might be useful for transporting inorganic cargo over planetary distances, it could never be made safe for living beings.

Either the aliens’ technology was far more sophisticated than ours - which, judging by its appearance, I very much doubted - or they had a far broader view of safety than we did.

In which case, I had grave fears for Seki’s safety. Not to mention my own. If I could have moved I would have fought and struggled, however uselessly, to prevent being placed in the cabinet. As it was, I could only await the inevitable.

My captor squeezed me unceremoniously into the cabinet, leaving me squatting with my face leaning against the side window at an angle. The cabinet had an unpleasant smell of oil and ozone.

The rising whine was muffled inside the cabinet, but I felt as if insects were crawling over my body as the green glow increased in intensity.

Hold on, Seki, I thought. Wherever you are, I’ll be joining you in a moment. Hold on.

And then I felt as if I was being torn apart atom by atom. It was mercifully brief. An instant later I felt nothing.

After an eternity of nothing I came to my senses once more. There were sights and sounds and scents, although I couldn’t identify them. There was a feeling of gravity beneath my buttocks, which immediately asserted itself. My back bumped up against something solid and my legs slumped outward from their squatting position.

The matter transporter obviously hadn’t impaired the nanomachines at all. I was still helpless to move.

I was sitting on something that felt like grass or moss. There was greenish vegetation on the ground, and several things that looked not entirely unlike trees. I seeemd to be sitting against one of them. Between the trees I could see a rich blue sky flecked with small white clouds. The air was pleasantly warm and a gentle breeze was caressing my body. The air was filled with the sounds and scents of living things.

But for my paralysed immobility, I might have been taking a mid-afternoon rest in a park on any inhabited planet in human space. If I didn’t know better I’d have suspected that our alien captors had a little compassion after all.

There was only one thing missing from my idyllic surroundings. I couldn’t turn my head to look, but I could turn my eyes, and there was no sign of Seki. She might have been lying behind me, or over the next hill, or a thousand kilocubits away. Who could tell how accurate the aliens’ transporter was?

At least the transporter seemed to have reassembled my atoms in the right order. Maybe the technology hadn’t been quite as crude as it appeared.

Oh, Seki, where are you? I thought. Wherever you are, I pray that you’re all right.

And then, because there was literally nothing else I could do, I just sat there and tried to enjoy the warmth of the day. As long as nothing tried to eat me, my situation was at least bearable. I wasn’t exactly in Heaven, but I certainly wasn’t in Hell either.

Call it Limbo, then: a situation to be neither suffered nor enjoyed, merely endured.

Forever?

Days passed. The days were warm and pleasant, with a few refreshing showers to ease the monotony, and the nights were cool and relaxing. I couldn’t sleep, but the warmth of the planet’s unknown sun often lulled me into a euphoric reverie that was only broken whenever I instinctively tried to move.

As the days wore on, I began to notice something else. A faint but noticeable tingling sensation in my skin was growing day by day. It wasn’t unpleasant as such, in fact it was making me horny, but that was frustrating since I couldn’t do anything to relieve it.

One afternoon a small animal with a long furry tail blundered into my leg. I suppose it must have been searching for the local equivalent of nuts or berries. Once it had recovered its bearings it began sniffing at my leg curiously as if it couldn’t decide whether I was a tree or an animal. After a few moments it seemed to come to a decision and climbed onto my leg, where it stood for a few moments looking up at me. The sensation wasn’t at all unpleasant, and I returned the creature’s gaze thinking, Hi. You’re a cute little thing, aren’t you?

The animal dropped to all fours and jumped down between my legs. Then it started as if it had heard something. After another of its brief pauses it turned to face the forest, which coincidentally made its tail brush against my crotch. Growling deep in its throat, it turned left, then right, then left again, while its tail caressed my labia. Hey, stop that, you little pervert! I thought. Pick on someone your own size and species!

The constant tingling in my skin was already making me unbearably horny, and being tickled by the animal’s tail was threatening to drive me over the edge. Of course it had no idea what it was doing to me, and it continued to bristle and switch its tail for several more moments before dashing off into the trees.

I could feel a slow wave of heat beginning to sweep over my body, and I knew that the tail had done its worst. First my clitoris, then my breasts, then my throat, then at last every square millicubit of my naked skin, were overtaken by ecstasy.

My God, I thought, I’ve just been stroked off by a fucking squirrel!

It was my last conscious thought for some time. Having been deprived of sexual release for so long made this sensation all the sweeter, and I gave myself up completely to pleasure as my body was racked by orgasm after orgasm after orgasm.

I wished that I could have moved my hands to stroke myself, yet even if I could there was nothing I could possibly have done to make my sensations any more sensuous, intense or prolonged than they already were.

My ecstasy went on and on through the night and the next day. I think it may have rained, but I scarcely noticed.

Two more days passed in sun or rain. My orgasms became gradually slower and more spread out, but did not stop completely. Eventually I was experiencing five or six beautiful climaxes a day of varying intensity, rather than an unbearable explosion every few seconds.

I was still helpless and alone, with little chance of ever seeing my home or my beloved Seki again, yet I was in a state of such physical bliss and euphoria as I had only ever glimpsed in dreams.

Perhaps this was Heaven after all.

The next morning, after I came for the second time since sunrise, I seemed to hear what sounded like singing. At first I thought it might be a bird, or whatever passed for birds hereabouts, but as it aproached I could hear what sounded like footsteps on soft stone or gravel, as well as a faint swishing sound that might have been made by some type of loose clothing.

My suspicions were confirmed when a robed and hooded figure walked into my field of vision. It was apparently humanoid, although the robe made it impossible to tell its exact shape, or its sex. In fact all I could see was a profile of its face, which had high cheekbones, large gold eyes, and sharply-pointed ears. As far as I could tell its face was covered in short gold fur with brown stripes, and as it walked past I was amused to see a long tasseled tail of matching colours protruding from the back of its robe.

At first I thought it was going to walk past without noticing me, but then it paused and did a very human double-take as my presence suddenly registered on its peripheral vision. Lowering its hood, the humanoid spoke what sounded like a greeting. It was at any rate spoken in what I took to be a friendly tone, although naturally it spoke an unknown language, and its voice was soft and pleasantly musical.

The native waited for a reply, which I was of course incapable of making by word or gesture. It could have take my silence for aloofness, but instead it chose to unfasten its robe and step forward.

The robe fell away, exposing the native’s striped golden body to my gaze. I liked what I saw.

The native’s body was very human-like in appearance, apparently young, and quite definitely female.

I had no idea if she would have been considered beautiful by her own kind, but to me she had an exotic beauty that was making me hot and moist again.

To my astonishment, almost as if she were reading my mind, she slipped a hand between her legs and began to stroke her vagina. Evidently she liked what she was seeing as well.

A moment later she knelt before me and spoke again, gazing into my eyes.

Luckily my silence still did not deter her. Whatever she saw in my eyes she took for assent, and began to caress my face and neck.

I could feel my body becoming flushed again, but I was sure that whatever she was about to do would give me even more pleasure than a bushy tail could.

With her hands she caressed my face and upper torso, while her tongue explored my mouth, and my vagina -

For a moment I was startled. I had forgotten that she too possessed a tail!

Her tail stroked my thighs, labia and upper legs and then began thrusting into me, almost as if it were a thick, furry penis. I don’t know how I managed to hold off my orgasm at that moment, but some part of me knew that pleasure deferred would be pleasure intensified.

It scarcely occurred to me at the time that her attentions could have been considered to be against my will. All I knew was that she was beautiful and I wanted her, and I was grateful that she wanted me too.

From The Chronicles of Lower Sorth (Scroll 37, Chapter 19)

It chanced that a young acolyte was returning from the High Priestess of Sorth’s annual seminar, when she came upon a beautiful young woman sitting naked by the roadside.
 

An acolyte is of course trained to be unfailingly polite, and this seemed a perfect opportunity to put into practice the teachings of the Priestess. And so, slipping out of her robe, she approached the woman and introduced herself.

The woman was clearly of foreign extraction, lacking the striped fur and tail of our race. Instead, says the acolyte, she had pale skin with almost no hair except upon her head and her sex, and beneath her arms. She was unmistakably a woman nonetheless, with firm pert breasts, a gracefully curved torso and long, slender legs. Her face was round and flat, with a small nose and slightly slanted eyes with white surrounds and bright green pupils; so runs the acolyte’s account, and according to the head of her order her accuracy cannot be doubted, at least when describing beauty.

And so the young acolyte knelt beside the newcomer and greeted her in the traditional manner. Curiously, the newcomer did not stir nor speak in response; yet neither did she shrink away from the acolyte’s touch, and so the acolyte decided the stranger was merely shy.

Crooning words of friendship and greeting, the acolyte proceeded to demonstrate to the stranger all the delightful arts of etiquette that the Priestess, and the Priestess’s advanced students, had taught her. Although the stranger was content to remain perfectly silent and still the while, the acolyte maintains that the experience was a joyful one for both of them; and more joy was to come, as shall be told.

To Be Continued
(Just don’t ask when or I may start to whimper)