The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

Candaes sat upright and gasped.

She coughed, hard, and the sound was aquatic. Again, then thrice, her lungs spitting up strange clear snot, and then she was retching, her stomach clenching, her hands gripping hard to the sides of the... the...

As the convulsions died, Candaes stared around herself in horror.

She was naked as a jaybird, and half-sitting half-floating in some sort of transparent bubble. The clear slime she had evacuated from her stomach and lungs engulfed her to the upper slopes of her breasts, like she was sitting in an overfull bathtub.

All around her, in every direction, were dozens of other pods.

All of them with a nude woman floating inside.

Candaes coughed again, and blew a fist-sized bubble of slime which she wiped away with a wrist. She put her hands on the grey-green edges of the pod—they looked like wrist-thick veins, stretching from where the pod was joined to a grey-green stalk just behind her down to where they branched out and tapered away by her feet. There were six of these veins, girdling the pod; apparently the clear pod flesh had ruptured between the two she was gripping, allowing her to sit up. Had it torn between two of the others, Candaes and all of the snot she was floating in would have poured out—

She looked down over the edge, half-fearing she would be far up in the air. But there was a floor beneath her, grey-green and slimy, with only a single pod between her and the ground. A woman with mahogany skin floated in it, eyes closed.

Candaes spat out a little more snot, and remembered. She had been on the Berengaria, there was an attack... the pool table had crashed into her leg.

Candaes raised her right leg. It worked perfectly, and felt fine. She lifted it into the air and it glistened with slime as she rotated her ankle.

Lieutenant Razka. She had taken Candaes with her, they tried to escape—

Slugbugs.

Oh, sweet triple Buddha. She’d been captured. She was on an Omphalid ship.

Candaes stared around herself in fear.

All these women... why only women? Where were the men? She scanned for Lieutenant Razka but could see only strangers, all trapped in pods, all asleep.

Why was Candaes awake? How?

There was no motion in the room other than a slight, soft waving to the pods, changes in the light reflecting off them as they slowly and gently shifted, rising a centimeter or two, then dropping down again.

They looked like clear eggplants. With women inside. Clear eggplants attached to giant ropey grey-green beanstalks, rising... how far up?

Far. Candaes couldn’t see a ceiling through the naked bodies floating above her. She sat back.

So. What now?

She was nude, on an alien ship. No one had ever returned from Omphalid captivity.

So the choice was to get out, try to sneak around the ship, and find some way to hurt or at least annoy the slugbugs; or to lie back down and hope she could fall asleep again.

Which was no choice at all.

Candaes put her weight on the two grey-green pod veins, but they bent as she tried to raise herself. Slime oozed out and spattered down onto the pod beneath her. So she twisted around, reached back towards the waist-thick stalk that the pods sprouted from. The base of her pod was moist, and her hands covered in slime, but Candaes managed to get a grip and pull herself towards the stalk, up out of the pod.

Gingerly, she lowered herself to the floor. It gave slightly under her feet, like deep, wet moss or gelatin-soaked carpet. It looked like the back of a drowned person’s throat. Candaes crouched down by the lower woman’s pod.

She floated inside, face peaceful. South Asian, probably, or one of their colonists. Her hair was only finger-long, a military cut like Candaes’.

Candaes drew her hand into a knife-edge and struck the pod as hard as she could.

It dimpled, but did not break.

She struck again, and again. Nothing. The woman remained impassive, floating.

Candaes dropped to her knees, opened her mouth as wide as she could, and bit the clear skin of the pod. Hard.

She pulled at the clear membrane, jerking her neck around. Nothing. She pulled harder, pushing with her hands, pulling away, trying to tear. The membrane held.

She growled.

Then she let go and started to laugh.

She laughed, tried to control it, and found herself laughing harder. The laugh turned into a cough, a choke, and she giggled and coughed on the floor until she could calm down.

The woman floated peacefully next to her.

Candaes felt better, somehow. A fatalism had come upon her and it was liberating. She would do what she could, and see what happened. She couldn’t do any more.

Crouching again, she tried to find an angle from where she could see an edge to the room, a wall. The pods ran up, up, to a ceiling high above. It was hard to gauge the distance because the pods were not neatly aligned, had only a little space between them, and were slowly moving to boot. But she could see the ceiling now, could see that there were perhaps forty pods between her and it.

A fortunate thing she had been in the second pod from the floor.

She couldn’t see a wall any way she looked. A random direction, then. Candaes glanced at her pod—still largely intact—rose, and walked in the direction it seemed to be pointing.

She walked past rows and stacks of pods. Hundreds of women, sleeping, nude. All of them were in the prime of life, young skin, well-formed. After so long—of course, Candaes had no idea how long—in these pods, how were they all in such good shape? The slime might prevent bedsores but these women looked as though they worked out every day. Their bodies were in great shape.

Candaes herself felt as though she were back on Mirabile, the last dirtside posting she’d had, where it had been her habit to run at least six kilometers a day. Her legs felt powerful, looked powerful. Her arms felt stronger than she could ever recall.

Not that I can tear open these pods, she thought ruefully.

Squeezing past some close-set pods, Candaes found a slightly larger space, as though one of the stalks were missing. The floor of the small area sloped down to form a shallow depression. Looking at the bottom, Candaes could see creases that ran to a point, as though it were some sort of closed orifice.

She carefully skirted the mouth (to be polite, it looked more like something else) in the floor, and kept moving.

Then she froze. There was movement ahead of her, movement more purposeful than the slow-motion oscillations of the glassy pods.

Crouching down again, Candaes crept forward. Ahead of her, around the grey-green of the stalks and the floating bodies she saw glossy black.

Slugbugs.

There were at least two of them; it was hard to be sure even though they were only ten meters away. The desire to see what was going on warred with Candaes’ fear of being caught, naked, and dumped back into a pod. But then, that was where she’d started from. The worst that could happen already had.

She slid to the floor, and wriggled beneath the bottom pod. The naked backside of a brown-skinned woman floated above her. Candaes pushed past, and slid up against the body of the next stalk. Peering around the knot of veins linking the neighboring pod to the stalk, she stared at the bugs.

Three of them. Three of them at least, all standing around one of the pods. Just bugs; they were lacking the clear flesh of the warrior caste. Two of them stood with their upper four limbs idle, but the third was using the sharp end of an arm to slice through the skin of the pod. Then it reached in with all four upper limbs and raised the woman inside to a sitting position. Slime flowed off of her head and shoulders. Her head hung limply forward.

Then she coughed. She coughed, and coughed again, then retched up a great gout of clear snot. Her gasp of breath was a wet spatter, and she coughed some more.

As her coughing subsided, she looked up at the faceted eyes that stared down at her. She turned to look at the other bugs, giving Candaes a view of her face.

The woman did not seem worried. Her expression was blank and emotionless. She turned her head back to the front; a small convulsion and another lump of slime pushed out of her lips and slid down to her chest. The bug that had raised her head and shoulders out of the pod stepped back and the woman stared at it blankly.

Then, from behind a stalk, a woman stepped forward. A human woman.

Or—mostly.

She was pale, with dark hair; naked of course. Her posture was erect, almost rigid.

She had antennae.

Suddenly Candaes was afraid of getting caught again.

The woman with the antennae spoke to the woman in the pod, who sat placidly looking up at her. Then the seated woman reached up and took hold of the forelimbs of the bugs standing on either side of the pod and raised herself up, slime oozing down her body. She stood staring at the woman with the antennae—they were maybe half a meter long, black, emerging from her temples—then she nodded slightly and said “yes.” Candaes couldn’t hear it from here, but the motion of the pod woman’s lips was clear. The woman stepped out of the pod, down onto the floor, and turned to face the antennae woman once more.

They kept talking. Or rather, the woman with the antennae kept talking, and the other woman kept replying with an emotionless “yes”.

Then they turned and looked directly at Candaes.

The warm room suddenly felt chill. The bugs turned, too, and then all five of them—three bugs, the woman with the antennae, and the woman from the pod—began walking directly towards her.

Had they heard her? Seen her?

Then they turned slightly, and Candaes realized that they weren’t looking at her at all. They were looking past her—and walking directly towards her.

She didn’t move a muscle as they approached, at an angle perhaps five degrees from walking right over her. Their eyes looked neither left nor right, only straight ahead, although with the faceted eyes of the bugs it was hard to tell. They came closer, the bugs’ strangely jointed legs swinging in a way reminiscent of clock pendulums. The women walked behind them, eyes staring forward; the woman from the pod still glistening with slime.

The other woman... she was beautiful, young, her neck-length black hair slicked back over her head. Aside from the insectile antennae rising from her forehead her body seemed perfectly normal, pink nipples capping just-over-a-handful breasts, melanin-disinterested skin glossy and smooth over rounded muscles which flexed as she walked. Pink lips which matched her nipples, a slightly upturned nose, and—

—eyes that were solid black.

The woman from the pod stared forward with glassy but normal brown eyes. The woman with the antennae... her eyes were black liquid, obsidian gems with an eerie lack of humanity.

Candaes didn’t move as they walked right by the stalk at whose base she lay. They made no sound as they passed, none of them turned to look at her.

When they were past, she risked turning her head to see where they went. They passed a few more sets of stalks and arrived at the small clearing with the depression that Candaes had passed before. The lead bug took a few steps down to the bottom, and slid into the floor.

Candaes blinked. The second bug did the same, stepping forward, and sliding right down into the floor. That depression was a... a door of some kind, a sphincter.

The third bug disappeared downward, and the pod woman stepped forward. The floor sucked her down. Finally, the woman with the black eyes and the antennae stepped down and slid quickly out of sight.

Candaes exhaled. She rolled onto her back, and sighed.

That was the door. The way in or out of this room.

A mouth in the floor.

It made sense, of course. Why would bugs have doors with doorknobs and little brass knockers in the shape of oak leaves? Their ship was biological—the floor made that clear enough.

There might be other doors. But the room was hard enough to navigate that Candaes had no faith in her ability to find her way back to this opening in any sort of decent time.

No, if she wanted out of this room, the mouth in the floor was her only real choice.

If she could even get it to work, of course. And she wanted to give the antenna-woman a chance to get away from wherever that orifice led. Candaes lay back and looked at the women surrounding her, floating unconscious in their dozens and their hundreds.

Where were the men? Where were these women from—she didn’t recognize any of her shipmates from the Berengaria among them. Had they been taken from a colony? Why were they all so young and healthy?

Candaes looked down at the depression in the floor. Now that she knew it opened, she could more clearly see the lines, the dark hole where they met in the center.

Well, here goes nothing.

She walked forward. Maybe she had to have bug pheromones, or use some sort of mental—

The floor dimpled and sucked her in.

For a very long ten seconds or so, slippery grey-green flesh sucked Candaes’ whole body swiftly downward, stopped her, and spit her back up again like a mouth emitting a cherry pit.

Candaes stumbled forward a few steps and took a deep breath.

A woman almost bumped into her—and kept walking.

Candaes spun around, but the woman was walking away, not quickly, with measured strides. Like Candaes, she was stark naked.

Passing next to her, another woman was approaching. Olive skin, feminine curves, muscular... and completely blank-faced. Her mouth was an unsmiling line, her dark eyes unfocused but facing directly ahead as she approached with a rhythmic runway walk, each foot coming to rest directly ahead of the other. Her hands swung gently at her sides, open, palms brushing her generous thighs.

The woman was staring directly at her yet hadn’t noticed Candaes at all.

She realized they were like that other woman, the one from the pod, the one the antennae-woman had spoken to. All three seemed... hypnotized. Entranced. Unaware of anything around them. Staring mindlessly.

And stark naked.

Candaes looked briefly down at her own body and noticed that, although still damp, she was no longer coated in the slime residue that had clung to her since she’d emerged from the pod. The trip through the... the ship’s throat seemed to have... sucked her clean.

Another overstrange thought for an overstrange day.

The olive-skinned woman walked past Candaes without a glance and continued down the hallway, each step identical to the one previous. Candaes watched her ass flex as she departed.

Going where?

The hallway Candaes found herself in was curved; fifteen meters either direction and she could no longer see where it went. It was round in cross-section, the floor slightly flattened but curving up to become the walls and curving over to become the ceiling. Ceiling and floor and walls were the same grey-green fleshy substance as in the pod room. Just behind Candaes was the depression that had ejected her, a closed aperture at the base of the wall or set in the rising edge of the floor, depending on how you looked at it.

Candaes looked back at the woman again and watched as she disappeared around a corner.

Now she was alone. Which way should she go?

On a whim, she followed the second woman. After a minute or so the corridor narrowed to an opening not much larger than shoulder-width; beyond it was a passageway at right angles to the one Candaes was in. She walked to the opening.

Just as she reached it, a woman walked past in the other hall.

Candaes swung her head. No, not a woman... Wait, yes it was, but...

Candaes stepped out into the corridor, staring at the creature’s receding backside.

The woman’s skin was a pinkish purple color and shiny as though made of plastic; her hips were giant curves flaring from her sides. The dimples above her buttocks seemed to wink as she walked. Her breasts were so large that Candaes could see the sides of them beyond the backs of the woman’s slowly swinging arms. She was completely bald, the top of her head reflecting the light as though it were a balloon.

Candaes turned around.

Another one was approaching. Pink skin, huge breasts, smooth round hips framing a nude sex. The woman’s eyes were featureless white orbs, but her face showed no more notice of Candaes than the normal women had. Her lips were hugely prominent, her nose small and fine. Her breasts were larger than her head, with shining grey nipples.

She sashayed past, walking in the same direction and with the exact same gait as the other Willendorf doll.

Comparatively, the antennae woman seemed almost normal.

Candaes watched them both go.

It seemed to be her good fortune that the women in this warren were all zombies, whether normal or... or pink plastic. None of them had reacted to Candaes at all. Apparently, she was just another naked woman in a ship full of naked women. Which was a relief: it would make getting around much, much easier. Although Candaes had the sneaking suspicion that the antennae woman might be more awake. Candaes would avoid her if she could.

This tunnel ran in either direction, curving slightly, just as the other one had. Aside from the two rubberized women sashaying away, there was no one else in sight.

Candaes decided to find out where they were going to rather than where they were coming from. She turned that direction and began to follow.

At a normal walking pace she found herself gaining on them; as she wanted to keep some distance, she slowed herself down. Although freakish she had to admit there was something... erotic about their hyperfeminized bodies. The slow, figure-eight motion of their dimples of Venus caught and held Candaes’ eyes. They would be interesting... exciting, to touch...

Candaes caught herself. What a strange thing for her to think.

She focused on the shoulder of the doll ahead of her, to prevent her gaze from sinking back to rest on her ass. They passed a few floor orifices, but Candaes much preferred being able to see where she was going over disappearing into the floor, so she kept following the pinkies.

There was more traffic ahead. A T-junction, this corridor emptying into another, larger one, one with more women walking past. These women all seemed normal, human—if normal meant walking with chin raised, staring ahead, unspeaking.

And all at the exact same pace. Candaes paused; every woman was walking at the exact same speed. Bare feet pressed into the fleshy floor at precisely the same time.

How many of them were there? If the pod room had been any indication, there might be thousands...

The first rubber woman stepped out into the corridor, pivoted in place, and resumed walking, disappearing to the left. Then the second did the same, rotating in place, then proceeding past the corner and out of sight.

A half-dozen nude women walked by as Candaes approached the juncture, five headed one direction, one the other. None of them had antennae; none of them were orchid pink.

Where could they be going? To do what? Why did the slugbugs have this crazy... place, populated with sleepwalking human females? Had they all been kept in pods?

Candaes reached the intersection, and for reasons she didn’t entirely elaborate on but which made intuitive sense, she walked into the larger hall, turned ninety degrees in place, and resumed walking. To where, she had no idea.

Walking quietly down the hallway, fleshy floor under her feet, walking in step with a couple dozen other nude women, not thinking anything in particular—it was surprisingly... relaxing. Soothing.

Also very very weird. Candaes was thankful for the weirdness. It meant that she was still sane.

Where all of these women were going was still largely a mystery. The hallway curved, so Candaes could never see more than fifty meters ahead of herself, and she had a sense that it was descending. Other corridors branched off outward, and from time to time women would turn and exit down these corridors, or enter from them and join the main traffic flow.

She saw several bugs; the first time one of them walked towards her, Candaes felt the skin on the back of her neck tingle. It walked by her on those strange, pendulum-swinging legs without appearing to pay her any attention. Why should it? She was just another nude human among nude humans, all walking in sync.

She also saw several more of the pinkish, giant-breasted and rubber-skinned women. They paid her no more attention with their blank white eyes than the bugs had.

Something flickered and Candaes let her eyes turn to look at it. The inner wall of the corridor, which had so far had no corridors running into it, had moved.

She debated slowing down, but that would single her out. Luckily, as she watched, it moved again.

It opened, revealing a blank-faced woman. She stepped out, turned in place, and walked away.

These walls had doors.

The place where the wall had opened nictated back shut. It reminded her of the eyelid of a frog she had seen somewhere.

A woman stopped in front of the patch of wall which had opened—Candaes could see now that it was slightly smoother, not roped with alien hallway muscle—and touched it lightly. It flicked back open, an oval hole which she stepped through. Then it flicked closed again.

Someplace important? A dormitory? It could be anything, but Candaes was tired of walking aimlessly. She stopped in front of the wall, and reached out with her fingertips to gently touch its surface.

It sprang open. Inside was a large room filled with rows of two-meter high lumps of some sort. Candaes stepped in.

At first the room seemed unoccupied. It was closely packed with slick grey humps rising chest-height from the floor. There was no sign of the woman who had just entered.

Candaes walked further into the room. She passed between the closest pair of lumps. She turned her head to look down at one, and paused.

A woman was seated in it.

It was as though the woman had sat down in an overstuffed grey plastic easy chair—and somehow pulled part of it over her head. From her feet up to her mouth her nude body was exposed, hands on top of her thighs, feet on the floor, her torso reclining at a slight angle. Her head above the nose was encased in an not-quite-opaque grey blob.

Colors swam dimly within it.

The woman’s mouth was open and she was breathing heavily. Huskily. Candaes looked briefly between the woman’s legs—and then back again. There was motion there, slight undulations, and she realized that the chair was... was fucking the woman.

The woman moaned quietly.

Candaes looked at the chair-thing on the other side of her. Sure enough, another nude woman was seated in it, mouth open, breathing heavily. Her nipples were taut and sweat was beading on her body. Above her nose, her head was encased in a glossy grey bead.

The fuck was going on here?

Candaes walked deeper into the room—it was closely packed with these chair-blobs, fifty or more, and so far they were all occupied. Some of the women’s mouths just hung open, slack; others pursed and moaned and licked their lips. All of them faced the same way, and they all had the slightly translucent blobs over their heads, like grey glass beads with opal colors swimming within them. Candaes wondered what the women were looking at, as the chairs slowly played with them.

It was arousing and disturbing at the same time.

Candaes came to a set of empty chairs; they had human-sized depressions in them and blobs on top, ready to ooze down onto a female head. No obvious dildos protruded from the seat—instead there were a pair—a pair!—of sphincters, from which whatever organs would doubtless emerge to push up into the body of the occupant.

She didn’t seriously consider having a seat, which given how erotic she was finding them was a little reassuring. Time to go—

The door nictated open, and an antennae-woman came in. She was leading another woman, tall and lean (and of course nude), who was already wearing a milky-grey blob on her head.

They walked directly towards Candaes.

She realized that she hadn’t hidden as she should have; the antennae-woman was looking directly at her.

Bluff, girl.

Rotating to more directly face the door, Candaes stared forward and began to walk. Measured, slow footsteps.

I am a zombie. I am a zombie.

She passed the two of them with only one chair-blob between them, and the antennae-woman paid her no heed. The woman behind the antennae woman followed, hands loose at her sides, the blob on her head having a strange bubble on the very top of it—

The bubble opened up and looked at Candaes.

It was an eye.

She almost—almost!—broke her stride. It was an eye—an eye atop the blob on the woman’s head. But Candaes kept walking and did not turn to look. Her hands were trembling just slightly. She wanted to duck down, to turn and see what the antennae-woman was going to do, how exactly she would seat the other woman into the sex chair and what would become of the blob already on her head, but that eye had turned to follow her and was probably still watching Candaes’ ass. So Candaes did not turn her head, she walked slowly but surely to the membrane, and touched it.

It flicked open, and she stepped out. Breathing a sigh of relief, she turned in place to walk away.

An antennae-woman was right there, smiling at her.

“Hello,” the antennae-woman said.

She was shorter than Candaes, with pageboy-cut brown hair and a slightly cleft chin. Her eyes were liquid black but her smile curled at the ends.

“Hello,” she repeated. “My name is Terry-instructive. You seem... lost. I can help you.”

“I...” Candaes swallowed. Should she run? Had the bug-woman already summoned backup?

“Let me help you,” the woman said in a warm, calm voice. “I can help you. Tell me your name.”

Candaes’ body felt like it was vibrating, ready to run.

“Tell me your name,” the antennae woman repeated. “Let’s talk. I won’t do anything. Let’s just talk. Will you talk to me?”

Candaes squared her shoulders. Maybe... maybe she could find something out.

“Sure. I’ll talk to you.”

The woman smiled broadly, showing her full set of white teeth. “That’s great,” she said. “I’d like to talk with you. Will you tell me your name?”

“It’s, uh, Candaes.”

“Candaes. That’s a lovely name. You were... United Colonies?”

“American.”

“American! Yes, we have many of those here. Thank you for telling me that. Candaes, do you have any questions for me?”

“I, uh...”

The woman smiled up at her, those black eyes liquid and wide and... innocent.

There were all sorts of choices but they were jumbled together. A question flickered at Candaes and she asked it. “What do you mean, ‘instructive’?” Candaes asked. “In your name?”

The antennae-woman nodded, her face becoming solemn. “That’s my purpose. I am an instructive. I instruct the drones in their duties to the Hive.”

“Why the, uh,” Candaes waved her hand vaguely. “The antennae?”

“Resk-Omphalids communicate with scent and vibration. I have been altered in this way that I may communicate with them. My antennae are how I talk to the Resk.” She grinned. “The bugs.”

Candaes found herself smiling in response. This pixie-like woman was disarming. “So where are we, anyway?”

“We’re deep within an Omphalid Hiveship. It has a name but not in human speech. You’d have to have a pair of these—” she wiggled her antennae “-to understand it.”

Candaes giggled, and the woman took her hands.

“Candaes,” she said, “I want you to look into my eyes.”

Candaes did so. They were black, wet, and deep. Something moved across them, like a circle of reflected light.

“Good girl, Candaes. Look deep into my eyes. You are happy and safe, Candaes. Everything is fine, you are happy now. Look deep into my eyes.”

She was happy and safe. Terry-instructive squeezed her hands and Candaes smiled and did not look away from those deep, dark, obsidian eyes. She felt as though she were being pulled into them, down into the liquid dark. It felt good.

“Good girl, Candaes. Good girl. Relax now, you are happy and safe, and you can relax and let yourself grow calm. Placid. Look into my eyes, Candaes, and let your mind just... drift.”

Candaes sighed happily, and felt her whole body relax. She was looking deep, so deep, into those lovely black eyes and she wanted only to sink down into them forever.

Terry-instructive was speaking softly but Candaes could no longer follow the words; she knew she was hearing them and she knew that she would obey. She was receiving instruction like a good girl, as a drone ought to. Receiving her instruction from an instructive and she would obey.

Suddenly, the antennae-woman shoved her head into Candaes’ tits.

Candaes blinked and realized that someone had punched Terry-instructive in the stomach, and that same someone was now sweeping her feet out from under her and dropping the gasping instructive to the ground.

A hand seized Candaes’ wrist and pulled; head still swimming in a soothing black pool, Candaes was unable to do anything but run behind the dark-haired woman who was suddenly dragging her away down the corridor.

Her name was Csina.

They sat together in a small alcove. The alcove attached to a room filled with heaps of strange black spheres; Csina said she thought the stuff was bug food.

“She really got into my head,” Candaes said quietly.

“They do that. The ones with the antennae and the eyes, they can hypnotize you really quickly. Usually what happens then is a bug will come along with one of those head-blobs, they plop it down on your head, and off you go. I’ve seen... it’s happened more than once.”

Candaes looked at Csina. She was three centimeters taller and four broader in the shoulders than Candaes. Although all the women that she had seen in the hive, whether ambulatory drones or asleep floating in pods, were in good shape, Csina was built like a sportfighter. She was not just strong, she was aggressively built. Angular. Her body looked dangerous.

Her face looked... distant.

“How long have you been... awake?” Candaes asked.

“Four or five days, maybe. There’s no sense of time in here, really, beyond sleeping and waking. I’ve slept four times.”

“And you’ve found others? Awake, like us?”

“Not... not that I could do anything about. I only could tell they weren’t drones after the bug women had found them. And usually the bug women are accompanied by jelly guards. I can’t fight them.”

“Jelly guards?”

Csina nodded. “Human women in... jelly suits. With hooves.” She waved a hand. “You’ll see them.”

Jelly guards. Another bizarre species of alien-modified woman. Candaes looked over at her companion.

“Csina...”

“Yes?”

“Thank you.”

Csina smiled at her. “You’re welcome. It... it felt good to be able to help someone. I’ve seen three women taken that way. They made a mistake, gave themselves away, walking wrong or talking to someone, and the bug women homed in on them and mesmerized them with their words. Then a bug would show up with a head jelly, and their mindless body walked off with an alien eye on top.”

Candaes shuddered. That had almost been her fate.

They sat quietly for a moment.

“You’re fleet, aren’t you?” Csina asked. “You don’t carry yourself like a colonist.”

Candaes nodded. “I am. Was. Am. Ship engineer. You a marine?”

Csina’s smile was nice; her mouth quirked up on the left side, higher than the right, and it gave her the look of being amused at herself. “Sure am. Cloud Tigers, grr.”

“Six Allied States?”

“Yeah, I’m a SASsy. You’re... Expanded European Governing Sphere?”

“Nope. American.”

Csina appeared surprised. “Really? Huh.”

“What?”

She shrugged. “Nothing. Just... first American spacer I meet, and we’re both stark naked. Not the rep your people have.”

Candaes blinked, then stared at her, then laughed, and Csina joined in. It felt good to laugh. They shared a look—it felt as though there was something more, but Candaes felt odd and looked at the floor.

“So now what?” she asked.

“I’ll show you where you can get something to drink, to eat. You need to use the head?”

“Actually, yes. Badly.”

“We’ll go there first.”

“Slugbugs have a WC?”

Csina chuckled as she stood up. “You’ll find out.” She stood up and extended a hand, which Candaes took and found herself lifted to her feet. “It’s... an experience. I don’t want to give anything away.”

The statement wasn’t exactly reassuring, but Candaes was in dire need of relief. Followed by something to drink, and if possible to eat.

Csina peered around a pyramid of cannonball-like orbs, then looked back at Candaes. “Okay, here’s the sit: pretend to be a drone and you should be fine. I’ll go first, just follow me, walk in step, look straight ahead. We’ll try to avoid the bug women; the drones and the dolls won’t bother us. The jelly guards... so far they’ve ignored me, they appear to only act if the bug women command them. First we’ll visit the head, then we’ll get you some food and water, and then... I don’t know what we’ll do then, Candaes. I haven’t figured that out. I’m kind of wondering if you have any long term goals.”

“Don’t get recaptured.” Candaes shrugged. “Other than that my card is empty.”

“We’ll figure that out later, then. First, let’s see to your hygiene.”

Candaes nodded. “I’m ready.”

“Then let’s make like zombies.”

“That was... something,” Candaes whispered.

They were walking next to each other. The corridor was empty, but they maintained precisely the same gait. Csina’s steps were a little shorter, Candaes’ a little longer, but their toes hit the ground at the same time.

Csina chuckled without looking at her. “You know, the ancient Romans used to relieve themselves in public rooms. Twenty holes on a board. Did business while they did their business. Going in private is a modern conceit.”

“A conceit that I used to hold dear,” Candaes hissed. “Along with facilities completely lacking in things that mist and suck.”

“You did fine.”

“Thanks. I feel better, at any rate.”

“Hungry?”

“Ravenous.”

“Okay, we’re coming up to another major corridor. We turn left, there will be a door a couple hundred meters on the right. There’s a drone feeding station there. Let’s space out a bit—follow me at five paces.”

“You got it, marine.”

“I hope you like nutrient slime,” Csina said as she stepped away.

Candaes paused and let Csina move several steps ahead of her. There was something comforting about the marine’s strength, the way her muscles moved under her dusky skin. Something comforting and... attractive?

She had a great ass, Candaes had to admit, but Candaes didn’t... wasn’t...

The corridor turned and opened into another large corridor. Csina walked out into it, stopped, pivoted left, and began to walk forward again.

Candaes followed suit. There were others in this corridor, nude women with wide blank eyes, walking either direction, all in time. Csina had matched them automatically, as did Candaes. She was walking down a flesh-tunnel, deep in a slugbug hive, surrounded by mindslaved drones—yet Candaes actually felt camouflaged.

A pink-skinned rubberdoll walked by the other way, hips brushing each other below her slick crotch as she sashayed by. Those blank white eyes were eerie. Further ahead, a larger group of women was approaching and Candaes quickly focused her attention on them. She felt her body tighten.

There were two antennae women leading a small pack of other types. One was willowy with pale golden skin; the other was curvier, the color of cafe au lait. Both had half-meter antennae sprouting from their foreheads above their liquid black eyes.

As they approached Csina unobtrusively migrated to the side of the corridor, keeping the same gait, giving no sign that she was any different than the other drones silently changing their trajectories to make way. The antennae women came closer and Candaes could see that they were leading a small crew of other women; eight of them to be precise.

The first two were jellied above their mouths, heads encased in milky-grey blobs, their steps robotic and stiff. A single slitted eye peered from the top of each blob. Behind them were two women who seemed normal, aside from the glazed look in their eyes. Behind those two were two women wearing what looked like shiny grey micro-bikinis.

No, they weren’t wearing clothes. The grey material was ooze, the same sort of slime that encased the heads of the women ahead of them. The two women in the third rank had their breasts and crotches encased in milky grey slime, like glistening two-piece bathing suits. And their faces—

—they were aware.

The one closer to Candaes and Csina was average height, average build, honey-colored skin with dark black eyes. She was staring ahead but Candaes could see her clenched jaw; she was fully aware of what was going on and fighting to be stoic.

The woman on the further side was voluptuous—excessively so—with dark red hair and a beautiful wide face. Her eyes were flicking around, scanning the corridor. Tear tracks streaked her cheeks but now she seemed in control, waiting for the opportunity to escape.

Behind those two women, however, came the guards.

Jelly suits.

Csina’s nickname didn’t do them justice. These women were strong like weightlifters. For a moment it looked like they were hovering a half-meter above the floor, but then Candaes saw that they were actually wrapped in clear jelly, jelly which darkened and became hooves as it touched the floor. Their human feet dangled in the air, toes pointed sharply down.

The jelly wrapped around them like thick rivulets of water, bunching up behind their heads and necks, flaring around the outside of their hips, enclosing their legs below the knee. Unlike weightlifters both women were chesty, their breasts slick with alien sheen. Their walk was strange, extra-jointed, hooves rising and striking the floor.

Candaes almost missed her stride when she realized what they were.

Slugbugs.

Slug... women.

The clear flesh... it was a suit. Or something. The slugbugs, the xenos that they had been fighting... they were just bugs, wrapped in that same clear flesh.

Now they had put human women in those soft shells.

The suited women didn’t have the blank white eyes of the rubberdolls nor the liquid black eyes of the antennae women. They appeared... fanatical. They stared forward with what looked like purpose and the mental clarity of thinking only a single, perfect truth. Their eyes were wide not with hypnotic glaze, but with absolute belief.

Candaes swallowed as they passed.

None of them had noticed Candaes or Csina; not the antennae women, nor the eyes of the jelly hoods, nor the mesmerized pair, nor the captives in the slime-kinis, nor the frightening warrior women in the rear. Candaes gave a silent sigh of relief as the final pair passed, walking with their strange extra-jointed legs. Beyond them in the corridor were only drones. They would reach the door to the feeding station without incident.

Then Csina stopped.

She stopped dead right in the corridor, in full view of a half-dozen drones and a single dolly. Candaes almost bumped into her.

“I’ve got to rescue them,” Csina hissed, not turning around.

“What?”

“Candaes, I have to rescue them. Those women. Did you see their faces? I can’t let... whatever, I can’t let it happen to them.”

“But... how can you...?”

“I don’t know. But... I have to.”

Candaes hesitated. They were stark naked, no weapons, no tools, nothing.

Csina turned her head. “Candaes, you should keep going. They don’t look back, no one with their own mind has seen us. I’m... I’ll probably get caught. You don’t have to—”

Candaes touched Csina’s shoulder. “Let’s do it.”

“I mean it, Candaes, I don’t want—”

“Shut it, marine. We’re in this together.” Candaes pivoted in place, showing Csina her ass, and looked back over her shoulder. “Win or lose.”

She began to walk, following the small procession down the corridor.

She had no idea what they were going to do when they caught up to them.