The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

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2

Two days earlier:

From the corner of her eye, Serry saw the shuttle flying next to her disappear in a cloud of vapor. One moment it was there; the next it was reduced to little more than metallic shavings, courtesy of just one of the hundreds of pieces of debris from her broken starship being hurled at them at relativistic speeds.

She knew then that if she didn’t do something to break the laws of physics, they were all going to die.

“We’re going luminal,” she said to her copilot, and her voice was amplified to the crew behind her. To her credit, she sounded nowhere near as scared as she was. “I’m switching off the synthetic gee now.”

To Serry’s right, Senior Lieutenant Eben Halc went pale. “We’re too close to the planet. We’ll rupture.” To his credit, though, the copilot started making the necessary preparations even as he protested. With a touch of a floating control, their gel harnesses began to fill with anti-g solution.

“No choice.” Serry smiled. “You don’t sound confident of my piloting skills.”

“I have every confidence in your piloting skills,” Eben said. “I just think you’re completely insane.”

“Maybe,” Serry agreed, then reached into her holodisplay and made the swap. The command section of the shuttle was like the interior of a cone on its side. The bulkheads—neither pilot could see these at the moment—slanted round them, narrowing to the front of the cabin and the perpendicular surfaces from which their buckets were affixed. These all-encompassing seats, one placed high and to the left, the other low and right, were surrounded by a holographic tank showing a modified view from the outside of the vessel. Only the seats and the hatch behind them to the rest of the cabin were visible.

From the pilots’ perspective, the two of them floated unsupported in the middle of space. The stars spun sickeningly about them as Serry dodged killer pieces of wreckage. A yellow-white planet was a small circle to port. In front of each pilot, a suspended 3-D holodisplay gave them instrumentation.

A second shuttle in front was clipped. The stern end shifted wildly and disintegrated. The rest of the shuttle began tumbling like a madly rotating gyroscope, arcing away in a lethal trajectory.

Serry rerouted negative-matter systems.

The universe revolved wildly. A stomach-churning surge passed through the interior of the shuttle as the geometry of the space-time continuum was pulled in a different direction than from that which it had been in a moment earlier. A sudden and absolutely crushing force pushed the two pilots back into their wrap-around buckets, which really did wrap around them then, tightly formfitting about their chests, limbs, and heads, providing them the support and pressure they needed to stay alive and conscious.

A twenty plus-gravity acceleration tried to flatten them. The blood was squeezed within their veins. Only training, their couches, and the gel inside those couches allowed the pilots to survive. Nonetheless, Serry imagined she could hear her teeth cracking. She bypassed the automated warning that told her what she was doing was not in any sense of the word recommended. At the same time, she fired the emergency thrusters on their starboard side. She shut off one of the three primary thrusters to their rear. The result was that the ship spun like a top, acceleration driving them into their sides. Someone in back screamed. The transdrive powered up using the rerouted negative-matter flow to augment the sputtering envelope trying to form around the ship. The shuttle groaned like an old woman in pain.

“Yeah,” Senior Lieutenant Halc croaked, grimacing. “Totally insane.” Serry couldn’t hear him. Between the engine roar, the blood in her body trying to settle in her right side, and the screaming of the ship as it decided whether or not to come apart at the seams, he might as well have whispered.

The stars disappeared into utter blackness.

Negative matter was an artificial exotic material that was hard to create and hard to keep around once it was created. Where normal mass bent space-time in one direction and attracted matter, negative mass bent space in the opposite direction. It actively repulsed matter. Practically speaking, negative matter served only two purposes, both of which were related to its unique spatial properties. In association with powerful electromagnetic fields, negative matter could make light envelopes, warps in space-time so called because light passed completely over them as it followed the curve of distorted space. A large-enough light envelope effectively pinched off a small portion of the universe around an object, leaving behind only a massless electromagnetic “marker” to show that that object still existed. As a virtually massless quantity, the envelope could then—in fact, had to—travel through space at the speed of light. Another form of light envelope, one held in place by electromagnetic fields of slightly irregular frequency and shape, could bend space more sharply. It could warp space in much the same way that regular matter warped space, though without corresponding mass. Such an envelope could, in other words, synthesize its own gravity, produce a gravitational effect in a confined area. The latter procedure was more expensive—cost more in energy and negative matter—than the former. At least two light envelopes were needed every time synthetic gravity was employed, and often more than two. At least one was needed to create the sharp distortion in space to create a gravitational field. Other envelopes were then needed to encapsulate the first field and isolate its artificial “mass” from the rest of a ship.

The two procedures, transdrive and synthetic gravity, were related but not compatible. The machinery were altogether dissimilar. The power systems drew from the same source but spread in opposite directions. One promulgated on the inside of a vessel, the other out. The electromagnetics interfered if they overlapped, and the negative matter evaporated if the containment fields holding it were not absolutely perfect at all times. The big problem, though, was that gravity, synthetic or not, distorted the distortion. That was why ships generally didn’t use their transdrives close to a planet. The light envelope might form only around part of a vessel and not another. It would be problematical, to say the least, if only part of one’s ship started moving at the speed of light and other parts of it did not. What Serry was doing to save her shuttle was not an approved military practice.

The stars disappeared in utter blackness. Then the holographic display flipped back on, and the planet that a moment earlier had been a rather small dot now filled the tank from one side to the other. It was the most dramatic of changes: empty space and the stars one moment, a great honking planet filling their perspectives the next, oceans and an icy continent in the pilots’ faces zooming upwards at them.

The whole ship shuddered. Something somewhere behind them went SNAP!!! in an extremely loud and disturbing way. Still, such things could only be expected. The shuttle had hit Indi A VI’s atmosphere like a bug hitting the window of a speeding ground vehicle.

More screams. The holodisplay caught fire. The friction of a sudden atmospheric entry blazed around Serry. Another deafening groan filled the shuttle’s cabins. The pilot shut off the side thrusters and straightened their course. Although it looked like they were falling face first into the planet, that was only the display at work. Serry’s maneuver had them emerging from their envelope in reverse, not an easy position to manage when one jumps nine hundred thousand kilometers in three seconds.

She fired her engines at the planet to try and slow their descent. It had no appreciable effect.

“I THINK WE’RE GOING TO CRASH!!” yelled Commander Serry Garrant, Chief Life Support Officer of the starship Flags of Centauri Independence, at the top of her lungs.

“WELL, D’UH!!!” her copilot beside her said. They looked at each other and smiled grimly.

The ground was approaching at a rather alarming pace.

“Heat increasing to maximum survivable levels,” Eben said, the words sounding like they were being pulled from his mouth with wires. The very air sat heavy and burdensome on their cocooned chests. The world was turning red. It was the blood pooling in Serry’s eyes. “G-forces are already past.”

“Acknowledged,” she screamed. Her fingers, feeling like they were encased in lead, twitched as much as they could. Thankfully, the shuttle’s chemiprocessor was still up to the challenge of interpreting. Serry tried to bring the third thruster back online, but it wouldn’t fire. A second was starting to stall.

She tried to reroute negative matter and energy back into the synthetic gravity. The chemiprocessor told her that was impossible. Uh-uh, Serry thought. That is not an acceptable answer.

The Flags of Centauri Independence had taken several preliminary looks at the Epsilon Indi system before going in, from a few light days out to a few light hours. These last minute sightings confirmed what their telescopes back in Beta Centauri had already observed years ago. As Chief of Life Support, Serry had run her own laser scans of the system’s planets. They were all more or less the same, surprisingly enough. The oxygen content was more than twice their own in each case, enough to cause oxygen toxicity if the pressures had been greater, but breathable. The real worry was the high CO2, present in the air of each planet in lethal amounts. Now, as they fell into the gravity well of the sixth planet out, Serry thought she could have picked a better place to spend the rest of her life, assuming they survived. She glanced at a readout terminal as she fought for control. Epsilon Indi A VI, she saw, was a little on the chilly side. The planet’s average temperature was only 4 degrees Centigrade.

Her fingers danced. The chemiprocessor reluctantly came around to her point of view.

As soon as she could, Serry switched as much power back into the synthetic gravity system as possible. She overloaded the system, in fact, knowing it wouldn’t last anyway. In the seconds before the ground came up to greet them, the thirty-plus gees they were pulling slid sharply away. Were they not wrapped tightly within their seats, were not gel covering them from head-to-toe, were not crash foam squirting out of every orifice in the cabin and expanding to fill every available space, they would have been floating.

At the last second, Serry and Eben sank their hands as far as they could into their soft chemiprocessor terminals. The shuttle, falling like the meteorite it had become, actually began to level off. Then it struck the planet’s surface.

A horrendous ripping noise became Serry’s universe. Everything went black again, but this was not the absolute blackness of the null zone inside a light envelope. This was a blackness caused by a superfluity of sensation, so many things happening at once they canceled each other out and caused the sensory apparatus—sight, sound, touch—to shut down. Then Serry felt pressure on all sides of her, an overwhelming pressure that threatened to break bones, and, in fact, did break bones, she could hear them snapping inside her, pressing down on her, and the world spun, and weight returned, and she felt an impact, and then she was rolling, rolling, and there was pain, and she tried to scream, but her mouth was filled with gel, and she had time to think, It’s not fair, this isn’t the way I wanted it to end, and then it ended.

. . . to be continued