Author's Note: This is a science fiction series featuring elements of reluctant/forced sex. This chapter contains anal, slapping, name-calling, and humiliation; a woman is coerced into sex against her will. The explicit style tends more toward pornography than erotica; depending on your tastes, it may not be for you. Please read at your discretion.
2.1
Gwen groggily opened her eyes. She groaned as she looked around, straining to make sense of her surroundings: cracked glass and sparking control panels, the plaintive wailing of wounded machinery, and the smell of smoke. She was still in the shuttle. Something was pulling at her head; eventually, she realized it was gravity. She was upside down.
Wade was still strapped into the seat beside her, unconscious. Gwen unbuckled her own harness; she screamed as she tumbled straight onto the damaged front windshield. The shuttle was inverted and pointed down; only a few centimeters of damaged glass separated her from whatever was outside. As she rolled onto her back to distribute her mass evenly, she told herself that the window was rated for space and atmospheric flight; surely it could stand up to her weight? As if in reply, the glass cracked loudly around her hips. She whimpered.
She flashed back to her sister on Earth, taunting her for eating too much pound cake.
Now is definitely not the time!
she scolded her brain. Breathing deeply, she slowly reached out to the loose harness dangling above her head. Wade was finally coming to; his neon-green eyes widened at the sight of his crewmate lying supine on the windshield.
"Gwen! Hold on, let me—"
"No, don't!"
It was too late. Wade undid his restraints, and he cried out as he dropped directly onto Gwen. The glass crunched threateningly. For a moment, he was perched atop the young science officer, head buried in her chest like an overenthusiastic lover. He pulled himself up, cupping her ample breasts in the process. He looked mortified by the situation. She stared at him, arms wrapped instinctively around his waist, and thought that his body felt even skinnier than it looked.
And then they fell through the shattering windshield.
Gwen and Wade screamed as they dropped to what they assumed were their imminent deaths. The trip, however, was mercifully short and nonlethal; the entwined pair broke through several layers of thick vines on their way down, their terrifying descent stopping and starting multiple times before they were dumped unceremoniously on a mossy jungle floor. The two rolled apart, panting and groaning as they recovered from their frightful introduction to the ground.
"Holy smokes..." breathed Wade.
The shuttle was a dozen meters above them. Its scarred hull, seared from entry through the planet's atmosphere, was lodged in the lower boughs of a massive, arboreal organism. The thing was blue-green, gnarled, and the size of a high-rise building; its limbs, sprouting thick from the trunk, gradually split out into fine networks like giant capillaries. The xenobiologist in Gwen was not sure if the alien lifeform could be called a tree, but it looked enough like one to suffice. A tree it was, she decided—at least for now.
Before she could investigate further, an ominous creaking noise sounded above her head. The shuttle lurched down toward them, the strange branches rapidly losing grip of the battered vehicle. Gwen and Wade scrambled to their feet to dodge the plummeting wreck. It missed them narrowly, quaking the ground as it slammed into the dirt with a deafening thud. It balanced on its nose for a second before belly-flopping, right side up, in front of its erstwhile passengers. They stared at it, dumbstruck.
"I was wondering how we were going to get to our stuff..." said Wade finally.
The two spent the next few minutes packing critical supplies and equipment: a radio, a pistol with some ammunition, signal flares, a headlamp, a portable navigator pad that was thankfully undamaged, emergency rations, water, and a first-aid kit. Shuttle One was the backup vehicle, a lifeboat, and not as well provisioned as the one Alpha Team had intended to use for their survey mission. Gwen and Wade would have to make do. A brief attempt to raise someone, anyone on the radio yielded nothing. They split their items between two backpacks and prepared to head out for Prosperity, the lost colony on this planet.
Gwen had sustained a minor cut on her cheek; she carefully applied an adhesive strip to her wound using a shard of broken glass as a mirror. She loaded the pistol with a dozen individually loaded, explosive rounds before strapping it to a utility loop on her hip. It was a heavy, blocky weapon designed for signaling and survival against wildlife, not sustained combat. She hoped she would not have to use it; she had never used a firearm outside of training. She doubted whether it would even be effective against whatever dangers lived in the local habitat.
"I still can't believe you were punching coordinates while our ship was
exploding
," grumbled Wade, hoisting his pack over his shoulders. "We almost died! Like,four times."
"Oh, quit your whining," said Gwen dismissively, silently verifying Wade's count in her head. "We're fine. Besides, my coordinates got us within ten klicks of Prosperity." She held up the reading on the navigator with a satisfied smirk.
"In a crippled shuttle that nearly crushed us—after we crash-landed."
"
Details
. We made it here in one piece, didn't we?"
She looked around in awe, her scientific inquisitiveness taking hold. Strange chirping echoed through the jungle around them, caused presumably by whatever were Inanna's equivalents to birds or insects. It still felt unreal to her that she was on another world, and not just a common, lifeless rock. Sure, she had read the scientific reports coming out of Prosperity, but seeing the place with her own eyes was an incomparable experience. It almost made her forget the ordeal of the past few hours since awakening from cryo-hibernation:
Her rowdy crewmates. Meeting with her commander.
Sex.
Fire and explosions, and the destruction of the
Tempest
. The crash landing. Little did she know how much rougher—and raunchier—her adventure was yet to become.
2.2
Gwen and Wade followed a winding path through deep, unfamiliar foliage. Countless enormous trees, like the one that had so abruptly ended their shuttle flight, loomed over them in every direction, obscuring their view of the daytime sky. The vines and eerie limbs graciously blocked out Inanna's bright sun, the star Ea, but also trapped an oppressive amount of heat under their thick canopies. Little winged creatures darted between the high branches but were too far away for her to make out clearly.
The two walked an hour in silence: she, occasionally glancing down at the navigator to ensure that they were still on course; he, grunting from time to time as he tripped on a rock or stepped clumsily on uneven ground. The device beeped steadily. It was the size of a small book, and its main display showed a spinning green arrow indicating the heading, as well as the distance to the given coordinates. Nine kilometers. Then eight. Then seven.
The air tasted rich with oxygen. The dirt beneath her boots was rich and loamy; and her step felt a tad lighter than she was accustomed to. Gravity on Inanna was almost imperceptibly weaker than Earth's. The conditions here, it appeared, were ideal for humans.
But it was hot. The temperature was close to forty degrees centigrade beneath the dense vegetation cover. Beads of sweat had formed on Gwen's forehead. She looked back at Wade, who trudged sluggishly behind her. He seemed unused to physical exertion; breathing heavily, he moved with a jerky, labored gait as he struggled to keep apace with her. She was not very tired, but she decided to take a break for his sake. They stopped at a bizarrely misshapen log covered in purple moss, where she set down her pack and stowed the navigator in a side pocket. No end to the vast jungle could be seen.
"All right, let's pause here," she said.
Wade followed suit. He plopped down on the ground in an exhausted, sweaty mess, sitting cross-legged as he gulped his water. He watched as Gwen planted a boot on the log, assuming a languorous stretching pose. She casually unzipped her jumpsuit and peeled down the top half of her uniform, tying the sleeves snugly around the waist. Underneath, she wore a black sports bra that stretched tightly over her chest and upper back, covering little else.
Wade gazed at her, mesmerized. She looked like a goddess. A mane of lustrous black hair cascaded luxuriantly down her back. Her smooth, muscular limbs glistened with a thin sheen of sweat. The closefitting jumpsuit suggested shapely and powerful hips, the epitome of feminine strength. She had a big bust, which now stood out even more against a tight, bare midriff as she took a sumptuous sip from her canteen. She caught him watching and cast a scolding glare in his direction.
"Stop staring at my
siski
," she said in a faux Russian accent, mustering up her best impression of the Alpha Team leader who had so loved to harass her.
Wade flushed red at the playful rebuke. "I wasn't staring," he grumbled, looking away.
"Okay," said Gwen with a doubting laugh. "It's not a big deal, you know. It's just, if you want to creep like all the other guys, try not to make it so obvious, okay?"
"A creep?" said Wade, his voice filled with hurt. "So, I'm a creep, huh?"
"Wade..." she started to chide, but he cut her off.
"I was the only guy on the ship that didn't treat you like a... a sex object! You know what Misha and those other jerks were doing while you were with the commander? They were taking bets on how long it would take you to, to..." He motioned vaguely toward her pelvic area. "And then they were laughing and arguing about who was going to... to
have
you next!"
She put her hands on her hips. "Nobody can 'have' me, Wade."
"Yeah, well, I told them that, and they just laughed. And then I called you and the commander to prove to those bastards that nothing bad was happening, but you... you..." He trailed off, his voice shaky with anger.
Gwen's averted eyes betrayed her as she spoke. "Look, I don't know what you think you heard over the intercom, but there was noth—"
"The intercom?!" Wade scoffed incredulously. "We could hear you
from the mess hall!
Gosh, it was so loud... Everyone was laughing at me."