Chapter 3:

Change of Course

I didn't care at the time. Gloriana occupied my days and nights. She was intent on discovering the limits of the human reaction to Gadrolphian stimuli, and I was more than happy to assist in her research. I spent most of my time in various states of restraint or protection on my bed as she administered her talents upon me. At times she would accidentally exceed my threshold and plunge me into unconsciousness, overloading my capacities. She claimed that I was the best source of the sexual energy she fed upon that she'd ever encountered before, and she was definitely the most skilled sexual partner imaginable; it didn't bother me that all the details were a product of my own mind. She did, after all, have a mind and personality of her own, but its particular form was up to the observer. Anyway, we spent days like this. It was a literal feast for her, as if a connoisseur of fine wines had come upon a cellar full of his favorite vintages. And for me it could be described similarly. It was paradise itself.

Meanwhile the viewports of the Gumbofucktitty showed increasingly more chaotic and energetic patterns of psychedelic, colored images. What sounded like beautiful poetry of the Gods emanated throughout the ship as the Jeebie engineers cursed and swore at the highly complex systems that they were trying to repair. When Gloriana paused in her ministrations to allow me to rest, I slept or stared out the windows, ignoring the crew's warnings. It was like a quadruple dose of LSD-57. Complete sensory chaos. I was engulfed in the swirling, eddying tides of many-hued light that burst around me, inducing a kind of trance that could only be broken when my alien lover entered the room. She had become so skillful that she could bring me to climax with a glance, and I was convinced that if she chose to she could kill any human with a kiss, the sheer pleasure of it sucking the life force from the victim.

I have a feeling that we could have been stranded in warpspace forever, drifting further and further from the the real universe, if the Kirullian space pirates hadn't found us. It was a mixed blessing.

I had just woken up in the lounge, sprawled in my couch, Gloriana's musky erotic scent still hanging in the air, when the entire ship rocked violently. I sprang to full, frightened wakefulness as I stared out the viewport. From the midst of the fractal patterns a huge black battlecruiser materialized, photon cannons spitting warning shots and gravity clamps gripping our ship in a 35 gigawatt death-hold. Our defensive turrets swiveled to take aim but were vaporized by beams of pure electromagnetic force that sprang from the attacking ship, the coruscating energy seeming to rip apart the fabric of space itself.

Then with the hum of matter transmission the boarding parties arrived, huge 6 legged, tentacled, 3 meter tall Kirullians, their black exoskeletons gleaming in the emergency lights. The valiant Jeebies tried to resist but the invaders had state-of-the-art fusino rifles that blasted our crew to atoms. Finally Gloriana, myself, and Captain Fuckjerk were the only survivors, captured in a repulsor web, helpless.

The Kirullians transferred us and everything of value to their ship, and then detonated the antimatter reactors of the Gumbofucktitty. The captain watched the viewscreen sadly as his ship turned into a cloud of photons and then quickly dissolved away.

With a burst of passionate, foolish courage I struggled to free myself, but the invisible force field around me didn't budge. It was worse than gangsters in old movies tying up the heros with really well-knotted rope. A lot worse. "Good try," mumbled the captain, green depression fluid flooding from his shoulder blades.

The next thing we knew was the lurch of a warp-down jump. We were back in realspace, stars twinkling happily from the blackness, and the huge pirate battlecruiser was hurtling down toward a small, blue-brown planet. No one had told us what would happen, so I felt afraid. Yet in the back of my brain I wondered what new and interesting adventure we were dropping into now.