The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

“I hate these missions,” Captain Janice Willis said to the empty air as she stared out at the star field. At one point, she’d wanted to join the Space Force, but the Space Force hadn’t wanted her. They took the cream of the crop, after all. Even with the need for starships to patrol the ever growing regions of settled space, the Space Force could afford to be selective. So Janice had taken her skills off to the merchant marine, ending up on the Vesta, where she had been for the last ten years. She was just about to say hello to her fourth decade in the universe, and before too long,there’d be pointed suggestions that maybe she should take a planet side office, especially before she moved beyond her fertile years.

Because the one thing the Colony Bureau loved was getting women to go out to the colonies. Every colony needed women—because they needed to grow their population, but there were never enough eager little women to do that. After all, when the questionnaire listed “how many offspring would you prefer to have” and stopped at ten+, most modern women decided their job at the local data-center was good enough for them, even if the world was crowded. You could talk all you wanted about the importance of colonizing the galaxy, but colony worlds, even newly terraformed ones, were very much a male paradise, with the lack of automation often leaving many women in the position of domestic help. That wasn’t for Janice. She’d be heading back to the core worlds, finding a nice place to stay and an office job to keep her bank account healthy. She glanced over at one of the readouts, the glass presenting a dim reflection. Thirty-nine years old, curvy, nice rack and the kind of curly auburn hair and green eyes that most guys loved. She’d never lacked for casual boyfriends, but she wasn’t about to get tied down with the other sort of responsibility.

No, that wasn’t for her. Speaking of that…

“How long until we hit the waypoint, Stacy?”

“Um…” Stacy frowned down at her control panel. “About ten minutes, Captain.” The blond navigator flipped a lock of her shoulder-length blond hair over her shoulder. “We’ll have to drop out and take a look then.”

Ships could fly in FTL, but they couldn’t see in FTL, so it was mandated that every merchant ship drop out at calculated way-points, where they could adjust their course so that they didn’t accidentally come out of FTL in deep space… or just above an occupied planet.

“Okay,” Janice told her subordinate. The bridge was nearly empty—the fifteen women on the ship were mostly needed when it was in port or handling cargo, so the only people who had to be on the bridge were a navigator and supervisor, and in between waypoints, you didn’t need those—just a single watchstander to make certain everything was running smoothly.

Not that it would matter. Most major malfunctions, in addition to being rarer than being struck by lightning, would kill you too fast to do anything about them.

“Well, it’ll be our last waypoint until we hit Conner’s Crossing,” Janice said. The colony is at the ass end of nowhere. They’d settled with promise, but it was mostly farming, the genetically engineered crops forming a valuable export, but even so, it was boring, and like most colony worlds, didn’t have nearly as many women as it did men.

In fact, Janice wondered if she could find some guy there who would be willing to fuck her. He’d probably be hoping that she’d stay, but well, it wasn’t here fault if he misread her intentions… Besides, they’d be turning right around and wouldn’t see the world for the next full year, so there was no worry about needing to stick around so long things became awkward.

In fact—The ship rocked, nearly throwing Janice out of her seat. “What the hell was that?” she snapped.

“I don’t know—the FTL fields are being denatured.” Stacy brought up the main display. “It’s like we’re running right into a gravity wave, but we—” And with that, the ship rocked again, this time actually knocking Janice out of her chair, and then all the lights went out.

Great. Looks like we’re going to be a statistic, Janice thought, bitterly. Then there was another shudder and she felt the jerking sensation of a bad translation back to realspace. Then there was an even bigger shudder, Janice went up into the air, and then back down onto the deck, and then she knew nothing more.

When Janice came to, she was looking up into Stacy’s concerned eyes. Eyes that were illuminated only by the glowing red of the emergency lighting.

Groaning, Janice rose up and looked around. The bridge was still empty.

Where the hell is everyone? It wasn’t like they were carrying passengers that had to be coddled. “Did you alert everyone?” she snapped.

“I did, but the doors are out. Everything is out!” Stacy licked her lips. “Lisa said we hit a gravity gradient that didn’t just damage the drive but it sent a power surge through the entire grid and scrammed the reactors.”

Shit. That was bad. That was… “How the hell did you miss a gravity gradient like that?” she asked Stacy. Janice winced as she got to her feet. She had a pounding headache.

Better that than the alternative though—corpses didn’t have to worry about headaches.

“It just suddenly appeared. I mean, I’ve never seen such a sharp increase. I mean, maybe a black hole or a pulse mine, but who—”

“Pirates?” Janice said. She looked at the dead monitors and frowned. They were close to a waypoint and while she’d never heard of a group of pirates who could afford a pulse mine, let along figure out where to put one, there was always the first time. But… Janice scrambled back onto the chair and hit the emergency link. Like Stacy’s the chair’s emergency link had its own little battery and independent network, separate from the rest of the ship and usually offline, so it would remain even if an EMP took out the rest of the ship’s systems.

Like right now.

“Lisa,” Janice said. “What’s going on?”

“We’ve lost the main reactor,” the engineer’s harried voice filled the air. “I don’t think there’s permanent damage, but I’m having to take time to bring it up, checking every system as we go.”

“Can you bring sensors up?” Janice asked. “I mean, I’d hate to find out that we’re next door to a pirate only when they start knocking on an airlock?”

“You want sensors or drive first?”

“Sensors.” Janice almost gestured at her blank screens before shaking her head in annoyance. She was too used to a visual link. “We can’t go anywhere until we can see and figure out what caused this. Might as well get the sensors up first.”

“Okay, but we’ll have to check out the rest of the ship—that surge may have done a lot more damage than we expected.” Lisa paused and then continued in a snarky voice. “I thought that licensed navigators were supposed to be able to see a supergiant before we ran into its gravity well.”

Stacy started to swell up,but fell silent at Janice’s quick gesture. “It wasn’t anything normal, Lisa, you know that. In fact, it might be manmade which is why I want sensors to see if we have any unwanted friends out there.”

“Shit. You were serious.” Lisa fell silent for a moment. “Okay, I’ll get the girls working and see if we can get the sensors up sooner. Okay?”

“That’s great, Lisa, let us know when you’re ready.” For a moment, Janice considered asking Lisa to do something about the hatches, then shook her head. Hatches won’t help us against pirates or a black hole, so let’s keep her attention focused on the important stuff. She hit the all-call on the link. “Attention everyone. We don’t know precisely what happened, but all systems are down and we’re running on emergencies. If you’re injured, contact Cecelia and use the manual hatch access systems to get to her. Otherwise, try and stay off the emergency link unless you have some real important news.” There was a murmur of agreement, but nothing else, as Cecelia started contacting each crewwoman in turn, making certain they were uninjured.

Turning to Stacy, Janice gestured at the rest of the bridge. “Let’s start opening up panels. Just because nothing caught on fire doesn’t mean it wasn’t overloaded by the surge.” Checking the systems would at least give Janice something to focus her mind on instead of who or what might be lurking outside of the ship, getting ready to destroy them or worse.

The process of checking every system was slow. The computers that could have done it in a few seconds were out, after all, and unlike warships, the Vesta didn’t have multiple redundant backups. No, the cargo ship had only what the law mandated.

Granted, that would have been all they needed 99 percent of the time, but right now, Janice wasn’t feeling charitable about the situation. As the minutes moved into first one hour, than two, she restrained herself from calling Lisa. If something had happened to hold things up, Lisa would call her. Since she hadn’t, the only thing getting on Lisa’s case would result in was further delay as Lisa had to talk to the boss, instead of getting their ship operational. Janice closed the panel under the communication’s station, frowning at the result. Half a dozen cutouts and fuses were blown, the smell of burnt insulation filling the air. Granted, the com array was probably the most vulnerable system, but it didn’t say good things about how much of a ship they had left.

All we need is navigation and drive, Janice reminded herself. After an accident like this, the only place the ship would be going was a full-scale overhaul…

And a hearing. Janice frowned at that. Sure there was nothing she could have done, but the accident had just cost people a lot of money, and captains like Janice were a dime a dozen…

First, make certain you can get back. Janice nodded at that. A few moments later, as she was just taking the access panel off of the sensors station, the emergency link beeped at her.

“Janice here, tell me the good news.”

“I’m going to run power through the system. Tell me if anything catches fire.”

Janice shook her head at Lisa’s sarcastic tone and waited. Moments later, the lights flickered and then came up, the emergency lighting going off while the various panels came back to life. “Stacy, check the navigation systems.”

“On it,” Stacy said, frowning as she stared down at her panel. “Long-range sensors are off, but we’re picking up…”

“What?”

“Objects. Not under power… I think it’s debris.” She frowned, and started fiddling with the sensors. “Long-range sensors aren’t just down, they’re fried.” She looked back up at Janice. “I don’t think we can fix them.”

“Give me visual. I want to see what we almost ran into.”

Moments later, Janice watched as the viewscreen flickered to life. Of course they weren’t looking at the outside of the ship directly. No, even objects that were close in stellar terms were far to distant for the unaided eye to see. The computer took in the information from the sensors, and then created a visual display—it was faster and more effective than just looking into a bunch of data readouts.

And right now, it was showing a vista of wreckage.

“Where did that come from,” Janice murmured.

“Not an explosion,” Stacy said. “It would have kicked all the debris away from the center. Look at the fragments—they look twisted.”

Janice nodded. They did look like they’d been warped somehow, like they’d…

Oh. Shit. “It was a gravity well—a deep and a sheer gravity well.” She paled. Normally, the worst that could happen when you hit a grav well was getting pulled out of FTL, maybe frying parts of your drive. But there were some wells that wouldn’t be like that. A micro-black hole would be small enough to do it, and sheer enough to cause catastrophic damage. So there was a big ship ahead of us, it hit the gravity well, got fried, and then the backlash from its own drive systems expanded out and caught us. If the Vesta had been first, or if the ship had been just a little closer to them…

“We wouldn’t have even had a chance to realize something was wrong,” Janice said. Two utter chance events—the black hole intersecting a ship’s FTL field just right, and the fact that they were close enough to be caught, but not so close to be destroyed.

“That couldn’t have been by chance…could it?” Stacy asked.

“I can’t think of anything else,” Janice replied. “Can we—”

“Wait a moment,” Stacy said. “We’ve got one beacon active. A lifeboat.”

Someone survived that? Janice frowned. Most likely it was just a fragment of wreckage, with a beacon that had somehow escaped destruction. But that didn’t matter, because the law was clear. You investigated a beacon. You always investigated a beacon, because there was nothing worse than to be abandoned to the night and silence, waiting for your life support to run down on you.

Janice activated the com to engineering. “Lisa, we may have a survivor. How soon can we start moving?”

“Normal space? Right now. I can get you thrusters. It’ll be slow, but if we’re close enough to hear a beacon, we’re close enough to get there.”

“Good. Stacy. Get us there. I’ll be down in the flight bay.” She entered another code. “Cecelia, are you available?”

“Yes,” the chirpy voice of the ship’s doctor responded. “I’ll meet you there.”

By the time Janice got to the docking bay, Cecelia was there, along with two crew women, Linda and Teresa. They were working at the tractor beam controls.

“No engineer?” Cecelia asked. The doctor was short, her head barely coming up to Janice’s collarbone, making her curves stand out all the more.

You know, I don’t think there’s a non-curvy girl on this ship, Janice thought absently. She bet it was due to some guy at corporate who liked looking at pictures of big-titted women and fantasying about them a lot. Didn’t really matter, since they all knew their stuff.

“No,” Janice finally replied. “Lisa needs to get the ship fixed and find out just how badly damaged we are, Stacy needs to pilot the ship and besides,we can help whoever it is, nobody can help them.”

“Ma’am?” Linda said, brushing her shoulder length blond hair back. “We’ve got the pod in the tractor beam. Its readouts indicate that the life-support is still operational. Sensors aren’t showing anything dangerous about it.”

“Good. Bring it in.”

Moments later, Linda carefully brought the pod in, the silver tractor beam playing over it as it passed through the force field that kept the air in the docking bay. Not that Janice was about to trust that. Too many of the ship’s systems had been damaged. No, they’d close the external doors first, rather than taking the risk that the force fields might glitch at an unfortunate moment—say, when everyone was out in the bay.

When the hatch finished closing, Janis and the others walked into the bay. The lifeboat was sitting on the deck, the air turning to white vapor as it played over the crafts cold hull. Janice walked forward, frowning as Linda pulled out her data pad.

“It’s reading functional, with a human-safe environment,” Linda said. “No biologicals…”

“Then open it up,” Cecelia told the crewwoman. Linda nodded and walked forward, using one gloved hand to pull the emergency release lever.

Lifeboats didn’t have locking hatches. The assumption was that if you were opening them, you had a good reason to, and nobody wanted an injured person to die because someone forgot the key. The hatch opened up, revealing the cramped interior, with four emergency seats visible—one of them occupied.

“Wow,” Linda said.

Janice didn’t want to sound unprofessional, but Linda was right. The man, unconscious in the seat, was well—an Adonis. Dark blond hair called attention to a face that looked like it had been carved by some Greek master making a statue of Zeus, the king of the gods. The rest of his body was in the same mold, smooth muscles, broad shoulders, the kind of body that could be that of an ancient warrior or hunter—but it looked real, with none of the too-perfect imagery that came from those who substituted nanotech treatments and cosmetic procedures for hard work.

“Get him on the stretcher,” Cecelia ordered. Staring at her sensor readout, she nodded. “No traumatic injuries—could be just exhaustion, but moving him won’t hurt, and I want him in the medbay.”

“Got it, boss.” Linda and Teresa moved forward, Teresa working her wrist-comp to tell the computer to reduce the gravity in the area. The two lifted the man out, his inertia still the same even if only weighed a few pounds now. “Wow,” Linda continued. “This guy’s muscles are like a robot’s… Are you sure he’s a he, and not an it?”

“I think my very expensive scanner would be able to tell the difference between organic bone and metallic structural materials,” Cecelia said. “Now, let’s get him to the sick bay before you two start drooling all over our sexy little castaway.”

Janice shook her head at that. Trust Cecelia to make a joke like that, even if it was true. The man just seemed to ooze sexuality, even unconscious. In fact, she felt a tingle of disappointment that the medical scan hadn’t demanded that they remove his clothes…

…For his own protection, of course.

Her com chimed, shaking Janice out of her thoughts. “Yes?”

“Captain, we’ve got a problem.” Lisa’s voice was worried. “I need you in engineering.”

“On my way,” Janice replied. “Cecelia, let me know what’s going on with our patient.”

“Got it,” the doctor said as she and Lisa moved their burden out of the landing bay. Moments later, Janice was heading in the other direction, wondering what Lisa had found out.