Chapter 3: Arrival

When the porterbot had put her cage back among the others, the hold was again left in darkness. A grumpy voice in the next cage said, "It's alright for some people. Some people get taken off to a nice meal and hotel-room conditions."

Helen tried to ignore the comments as the owner of the grumpy voice became more abusive of what he called "shameless whores who use their cunts to get what they want".

Obviously it was no good telling Mr. Grumpy that it wasn't her idea and that only two days ago she had been a virgin and determined to stay that way. Although, she had to admit to herself, that orgasm the night before had been the most marvellously exciting thing ever to happen to her, and the food was good.

Suddenly the space ship started to lurch and the cages swayed perilously. What was happening; were they going to crash; had they hit something? Then there was a tremendous crash followed by complete silence.

"Not a bad landing," said a voice from the loudspeaker, "considering this is only a freighter with no passenger comforts to speak of. I am sure all our passengers will be pleased to know that we are now on Csadia and they will be unloaded in a matter of minutes."

Then another voice, which Helen thought was Colin's, added sarcastically, "Captain Courageous and his crew thank you for choosing Prison Transport Spacelines and don't expect to see you again. Please form an orderly queue for customs and immigration formalities."

After a short wait the two doors of the hold opened to a scorchingly hot day with sunlight so bright that Helen was dazzled for some minutes. The porterbots from the space ship moved the cages out onto the tarmac and started to fill the hold with heavy looking boxes which were stacked there. There was no sign of any other activity around the space ship.

As her sight got back to normal, she looked at the terminal building and then turned her head to the left and almost fainted. Unlike the Earth, where everything was so crowded, she could see further than she had ever seen before and there seemed to be no other buildings anywhere near. Nor were there any people visible. All she could see was an endless vista of sand and small rocks, unrelieved by any vegetation, or hills. The horizon seemed unimaginably far away. There was no movement anywhere. It was really quite disorienting to Helen, who had never been able to see much more than a hundred yards away from her in any direction except up.

Helen had expected another set of prison guards to supervise the arrangements here, but there was no sign of any security. 'Anybody, ' she thought, 'could stow away on the space ship and escape back to Earth. If I could only get out of this cage.'

Just then a furtive movement caught her eye behind the boxes nearest to the terminal building; a man in dingy overalls was doing just that! He sneaked up to the space ship and climbed in to the hold. When a porterbot asked what he was doing he replied "Checkin' that you're doin' it right," and that seemed to satisfy the low intelligence robot.

Soon the loading was complete, the porterbots all went inside, and the inner metal grid door closed, but the outer one stayed open. Suddenly, without any warning or fuss, the space ship lifted quietly from the landing pad and rose quickly so that in a matter of seconds it was a tiny dot in the sky and then vanished. Horrified, Helen remembered that the outer door of the hold was not shut, so that as the space ship left the atmosphere the stowaway would have no air to breathe. Evidently, no other security was necessary to prevent escapes, as stowing away was just a quick and certain, if elaborate, way of committing suicide, and this option was left open by the authorities on Csadia for anyone who wanted to take it.

Two porterbots now came out of the terminal building and started the task of moving the cages inside. The porterbots seemed old and battered, compared with the ones on the space ship, but Helen assumed that this far from civilisation things would be a little more primitive. The process of getting the cages inside did not take long, as there were only about thirty cages. Evidently there were regular freight runs to fetch the uranium from Csadia to Earth and the accumulated prisoner traffic was sent whenever a ship was leaving. Helen was pleased to see that the cages with men in them were separated from those with women in. Evidently the prisoners here were kept segregated in different sections of the prison, or even in different prisons. That would make life easier for her, she was sure.

The ugliest looking woman Helen had ever seen, with a scar on her face which almost closed her left eye, came into the room. She as wearing a pair of dingy overalls and Helen didn't think she looked at all smart; obviously she couldn't be a Prison Guard.

"I am Kate, called 'One-Eye' but not by the likes of you, and not to my face by anyone. I have the unfortunate job of sorting you out and arranging assignments. We can do this the easy way or we can do this the hard way. I have a persuader here which I will not hesitate to use." Kate held up a thin rod about a foot long with a shiny tip. There was a gasp from one of the prisoners, who evidently knew what it was, but Helen didn't think anything that short could hurt much, no matter how hard Kate hit someone with it.

"I see that a lot of you don't recognise it; they are illegal on Earth but here on Csadia we are a long way from the Earth's policebots," said Kate, "so I will demonstrate its power for the benefit of the uninitiated."

She walked over to the men's cages and stood in front of the cage holding a fat, well dressed, smiling man and said, "I see you had friends at the spaceport, or on the ship, to supply that lovely suit. I, personally, have a use for it; take it off and give it to me as a present. It would look good on my husband."

The man just smiled and shook his head, so Kate touched his hand with her 'persuader' and the man screamed in agony. The smell of shit suddenly wafted from his cage and his trousers turned dark where he had wet himself.

"Now look what you did," sneered Kate, "Now I need to get it clean before I can give it to him, or sell it. Get that suit off now!" She motioned towards him with the 'persuader'.

As the man undressed quickly, Helen thought that this must be a neural whip so beloved of the blood-and-thunder senso-films and ThreeVee war epics and resolved to cooperate as best she could. She certainly hoped never to feel its touch. The smacking and the belt had been pain leading to pleasure which marked her body temporarily; she was sure that this would leave no marks on the body but would scar her mind for life.

Kate looked round and, satisfied that she had made her point, left the room carrying the fat man's suit.