Ready to fall into the void at any moment, the metallic teardrop hung in space against the vast wash of myriad coloured stars. Commander Cassandra Wraith was about to embark on the longest short voyage in human history and if it worked out it would herald in a new era of space exploration.

She worked her mouth for just a hint of moisture as she studied the array of tiny blue and white lights in front of her. What was out there, she pondered?

“Are you ready Cassie?” an anxious female voice combatted the static in her earpiece.

Cassie took a deep breath, too distracted to answer. She looked over the silver-blue console and ran the numbers for the fourth time in as many minutes.

“Cassie?” the voice asked again with a growing urgency.

Without replying the terrified pilot ran her hand through her close cut Afro and scratched at it nervously as she rapidly blinked her copper-brown eyes. She should be wearing her helmet she knew, but the visor obscured the readouts and if this went wrong a sealed suit wouldn’t save her anyway.

“Commander Wraith, are you reading me?” the almost panicked voice was shrill now.

Cassie cast an eye back at the small chamber of the pod and then for the first time in minutes at the endless expanse of stars surrounding the tiny space craft. This is just a test jump, she reminded herself, a quick hop via wormhole and then straight back.

“Control, I am reading you,” Cassie said at last and then heaving one mighty sigh she added, “All systems go.”

“Good, very good,” the still strained voice came back. “Remember you don’t have to touch anything, better you don’t. We’ll run the whole thing from here. The retrieval is automatic.”

There was an annoying lag to the communication. Just four seconds, but it made everything all the more tense.

“Roger that, control,” Cassie answered after the lag.

Then for the longest time nothing happened. Then it did.

*

There was no sensation, no pain, not jolt, no silver swirling tunnel like water running down a plughole as in all those old movies, nothing. One minute she was looking at a great expanse of stars and then everything went black.

For a moment the darkness was of the grey sort and then it darkened to a clean glossy black. But almost at once the stars came on as if someone had thrown a switch and Cassie knew she was somewhere else entirely.

“Christ and all his angels on a bike,” she breathed reverently, for once not taking the Lord’s name in vain. The sight was majestically awesome in the literal sense of those words.

She darted a look at the console for the carrier signal light. In theory the wormhole was still open and control could still start the retrieval sequence. But as she looked there was nothing and her heart punched hard so that it almost vomited through her throat.

But then she remembered that the system shut down during the jump to protect itself and would take a few minutes to reboot. She relaxed a little and tried to breathe.

“Enjoy the view girl,” she whispered, “You’re the only one who will ever see this.”

Ahead the stars hung in a rash of light like a nightclub curtain ready to be drawn back to reveal the Galaxy’s secrets and she gasped. For a moment she realised she could stay this way forever and never go back. She looked at the console again this time dreading its restoration and the end to her brief sojourn here. But her gaze was drawn instantly back to the glimpse of heaven ahead of her.

The voice in her earpiece was so strange that she took a moment to recognise it as words at all.

“Control?” she answered it hesitantly, muttering, “Maybe it was distorted by the…” then she saw that the reboot hadn’t finished and she froze. “Hey, who is that? Identify yourself,” she barked, trying to sound like her instructor in the academy.

The voice came again more tentatively this time and then broke into a kind of verbal tirade that sounded like Greek, Hebrew and verbal hieroglyphics all at once.

“Christ on a bike, you have got to be shitting me,” she gasped.

Before she could think of anything intelligent to say the console came alive and began a full diagnostic sequence, or at least that was what it looked like.

“That isn’t supposed to happen,” she blurted and tapped the carrier light frantically. “Control, control, do you read me?”

“Please stand by,” a weird metallic singsong voice spoke in her earpiece.

“Oh Christ, oh Christ, oh Christ,” Cassie burbled rapidly. She wished now that her space suit had some inbuilt sanitary arrangements, but she was only supposed to have been here for 30 minutes tops and no one had thought to bother.

“Christ, a semi-mythical figure of disputed provenance,” the strange voice sang. “Surely you don’t think I can be he…?”

Another more natural voice cut in using the alien language again. This time it was decidedly male and was definitely very pissed off.

*

Vandal punched the creaking educator and urged it to hurry up, as if the dumb machine could be. The universal translator had worked well enough, but so far only the ship could speak the alien’s language as determined from the downloads.

To avoid an incident and risk getting fired on, Vandal had allowed the ship to communicate before he could communicate himself directly, but he could see now that that could have been a mistake.

Vandal frowned as he weighed up the situation. He could just see his profits getting lost in some xeno-diplomatic wrangle. This was something he just didn’t need right now.

“The sensors are identifying a more or less humanoid female,” the ship informed him.

“Yeah, I got that part,” Vandal sighed as he scratched the grey bristle on top of his head. Time for a haircut he mused. “Maybe I should be suited up?”

He imagined the ship giving a shrug at this point, and he eyed his space armour woefully. Come to think of it he hadn’t worn it in months and his already large muscled frame had acquired a hint too much of blubber from the enforced inactivity.

“The alien seems to think we are its deity,” the ship informed him.

Sometimes the ship could be a bit too literal, he thought. It was obvious the female was swearing out of annoyance or fear. The question was, what was she doing here? Was this an invasion?

Vandal shook his fists over the treacle like processors as they translated the downloads from the woman’s ship. If this was an envoy or an invasion he would have to report it and that was going to be bad for business. Then his implant went pop in his head, signalling the educator had finished.

“At last,” he growled as he pulled down the raw data.

He knew the language he read was called English and he now understood it perfectly. Within a few minutes he knew almost as much about Cassie’s mission as she did.

*

The man in her earpiece had a very strange accent. Its tone was deep and rounded like pebbles on a beach and if she had had to place it, she would have gone for something somewhere between Scottish and Russian with a hint something new entirely.

“Listen woman, I don’t know who you are or where you came from, but don’t do anything stupid. I am bringing you aboard so we can talk,” he was telling her.

“I am Commander Cassandra Wraith of the Earth ship…” Cassie paused; the ship’s designation was classified. If she couldn’t tell her people about it why the hell should she tell an alien?

The A word shocked her now she had thought of it and she gulped.

“Good for you, woman,” the man grunted, “I am Vandal, deep space rare mineral hauler and salvage, what are you doing out here?”

“Oh shit,” Cassie muttered and then repeated the phrase as if it could shield her. “Are you… are you… eh… an alien?” she finally asked as the other ship swung about and moved nearer.

It looked like a giant sphere with tapered wings. But as it turned she saw that it had a fat blunted cone at the back that on an old Earth ship might be a jet booster. But this was way too big, almost five times the size of her own ship.

“An alien, me?” the man asked puzzled. He consulted the database from the woman’s ship and chuckled. “Oh sure, an alien, that’s me, I’m a ‘bug-eyed monster’” he read the last part off the monitor. There was so much crap on the computer that he had no trouble dragging out useful tidbits of cultural detail.

“Y-you sound human enough?” Cassie put in as she tried not to panic.

The cone in back of the ship was yawning open as the alien craft backed on to her.

“So do you come to that,” Vandal replied.

“Well I am,” Cassie said indignantly.

“Of course you are, more or less,” Vandal told her matter-of-factly. “You are probably from one of the seed planets sown during the Expansionist Wars back in the day. Not that I know much history. Not the ancient classical stuff anyway.”

He knew if he kept her talking then she would probably stay calm and not activate any weapons she might have. Not that ship had detected any yet. The database hadn’t either.

“Look, I am just a test pilot, I came through the wormhole. If you let me go, I’ll go back again,” Cassie sounded a tad whiney to her ears and she cursed under her breath.

Maybe she should be more threatening?

“Yes, and then what?” Vandal asked.

The sliver teardrop slid comfortably into the docking bay and the doors swallowed it whole.

*

Vandal stood almost two meters tall and was twice as broad as any man she had ever seen. His cheekbones were sharply defined and impossibly high, a look complimented by his thick broad chin giving him a rugged beauty. His eyes too were striking; the irises were almost black against his almost silver white complexion.

“You must be Vandal?” Cassie said extending her hand.

Standing before him in the dark shadowy bay she felt almost dwarfed in comparison. She was short enough as it was by human standards, but this man was a giant.

Vandal eyed her extended arm suspiciously and then at the woman herself. Her dark olive skin was a novelty and she was almost impossibly small, almost like a child. But he couldn’t deny that her beauty was exotic in the extreme.

“Are you alone here?” Cassie asked, now becoming nervous under the man’s gaze.

Vandal nodded, without thinking if the gesture was universal. The database had been silent on that point. “Are you?” he asked, but he already knew that she was.

Cassie nodded, suddenly afraid. Yep, I’m about as alone as anyone ever had been.

Vandal realised that there were parts of the near galaxy where trade in sentient beings was very lucrative. This woman was a test pilot, a one-of. He could skip out of there with her and by the time the aliens came for her, they would find nothing; not even a hint of his people this far out.

Maybe Cassie read it in his eyes, maybe she just intuited it, but suddenly she dropped back and looked for an exit.

Too late Vandal shook off his dishonourable thought and his face softened. He would have to play this out by the book, he knew. He was about to say ‘welcome to the Varassi Expanse’ when the woman drop kicked him.

The kick was quite a good one and he staggered back with a grunt. A full-sized woman would have knocked him down with that technique but Vandal was only momentarily stunned. Her attack was a grave insult among his people but with no witnesses he might have let it go under the circumstances. Then the woman did something stupid.

He hadn’t had time to seal-up the outer hatch when the woman hit the door release. In little more than a micro the exposure would have ejected her ship and both of them into space. Vandal’s instinct told him to lunge back inside and let her die but at the last minute he grabbed her and hauled her with him.

Cassie hadn’t been thinking. After all her ship was just there and by now the reboot would have happened and… the sound was a roar like an angry dragon. Only its breath was cold and clawed at every part of her.

Okay, she thought, that wasn’t too smart. She now realised what she had done. I guess I have just killed us; it was a casual thought. There was no time for anything else.

*

Vandal spat out an angry stream of unintelligible words before settling upon, “You stupid milgree.”

“I…” was all Cassie had breath for.

Worse than the alien’s anger, was the knowledge that her ship was now spinning away into unknown space.

“You stupid…” Vandal continued, “I ought to pilash your lissi…” he snarled.

“My ship,” Cassie wailed, “You have to get it back.”

“I have to…” he gaped incredulously, “I don’t have to do anything unless I do pilash you.”

“Eh…” Cassie said as she picked herself up of the floor.

Vandal, already on his feet, extended his hand to help her. He consulted the database, this time having to go to some fictionally Earth sources. It seemed that physical punishment was out of fashion in this woman’s culture. He found the words and grinned.

“I think it has probably been too long since you went across a man’s knee for a long sound spanking on your bare bottom,” he said, quoting something.

Cassie’s mouth was an O and she baulked. This was too crazy now.

“We don’t do that,” she said indignantly.

“Well, we do,” he muttered.

“You wouldn’t dare,” Cassie yelled.

She had no idea of the cliché or the futility of such a challenge to a man of the Inner Shand of the Tyril Clan among the Varassi.

“I have shut your ship down,” Vandal said wearily, “I can retrieve it later. Just now we have some poor etiquette to deal with…”

Cassie made to speak but he silenced her with a look.

“… an attitude to adjust, and one small matter of two attacks on my person,” he continued.

Relieved to hear her ship was safe, she frowned. What was he talking about? She had only attacked him once, oh, unless you count trying to eject him into space, she winced inwardly, good job I am not in the diplomatic corp.

*

Cassie was led into the bowels of the ship through a dark corridor lit only by smoky blue lights. The floor was narrow and hard, but the walls were soft to the touch. As exotic alien ships went it was hardly spectacular. She was still pondering this when they entered a better lit circular chamber with random shelves on one side. There were dozens of strange implements and devices Cassie couldn’t explain but she was given no time to inspect them further.

“This is the…” Vandal groped for a word and then supplied, “Tool shack.”

“You have a couch in your tool shed,” Cassie observed drily, as she eyed the padded bench facing the shelves.

“That’s not a… oh no matter it will serve,” Vandal answered.

Before Cassie could say more the large alien pilot grabbed her and hefted her as easily as an overnight bag and dumped her in his lap as he sat down.

“Hey, what are you doing?” she squealed.

“I told you,” Vandal growled, “Alien or not, I will suffer no more insults from you. I am going to give you the spanking you so richly deserve.”

He had already scoped out the schematics for Cassie’s suit, so it was no trouble to release the panel at the base of her spine that held the upper and lower parts to her clothing together. With an iron grip to hold her helpless it was absolutely no trouble to shuck the lower part down and off to get at her skin tight under-suit.  For an alien she had a comely bottom and vandal realised that this might be fun, but he hesitated for a moment before baring it, after all the tight fabric would have offered her little protection.

“Get your big ugly hands off of me,” Cassie yelled.

Vandal shrugged, he had a job to do so he might as well do it well, he thought. The fabric tore away easily leaving the smooth full olive curves of Cassie’s bottom exposed to his gaze. A large part of his anatomy shrugged off its chemical suppression and throbbed to life.

“Oh my God,” Cassie gasped, “You can’t do this.”

“Do you know what Commander?” he said with a broad grin, “There is absolutely no one here to stop me.”

His hand landed like a titanium shield-paddle with twice the weight and she yelled. The tang of it was like fire and sizzled.

“Jesus,” she hissed.

“No, my name is Vandal,” Vandal said as he spanked her again.

“No-no-no-noooo ahh,” she growled angrily as his powerful arm spanked down several more times.

Bent in half and nude from the waist down, Cassie felt totally helpless, and the more she struggled the more helpless she felt.

Like an unrelenting machine, his arm rose and fell with a biting power until a kicking Cassie was rasping for breath.

“Please, I get it, I’m sorry,” she wailed, “Her cries getting close to dry sobs.”

“Oh you’re getting it alright and you are not sorry enough in my book,” Vandal told her as he continued the spanking.

“Oh my God, Jesus, Jesus, I’m sorry, alright, I’m sorry,” she began blubbering, the first of many tears cascading down her face.

“Sorry is a good start, in 20 or 30 microns we will investigate a formal apology before I punish you further,” Vandal told her.

“Punish me… oh God,” Cassie wailed, “You can’t do this, I am a commander in the space corp.”

“You think not,” Vandal said in a voice like gravel, “What’s this, or this?” he asked, spanking her.

“Ooooh,” she squealed.

“Any questions?” he barked.

“How long is a micron?” Cassie sobbed.

“It is 100 micros of course,” Vandal said casually as he settled into spank her further.

*

“Mr Vandal, Sir,” Cassie sobbed as she knelt before him, “I apologise for any offence I have caused and I am truly sorry.”

Her bottom ached under a sizzling surface of sting that just wouldn’t quit. Worst of all she was so cowed that she had no energy for any resentment of him. She was just glad that it was over. She even found a certain amount of grudging respect for him, especially after he had shared some insights into his culture. Even if that had been done in pauses between the onslaught on her bottom. In other circumstances she might quite have enjoyed some robust interaction with such a man.

“I… I also want to…” she gulped, “Thank you for… for s-spanking me so thoroughly as I…” here she sobbed in mortification, “I deserve,” she finished as he had now trained her.

“Most satisfactory,” Vandal said cheerfully, “Now you may face the wall in shame until I am ready to continue your spanking.”

“Continue…” she gasped.

“Oh yes,” Vandal said dismissively, “it is the spanking on a repentant bottom that is the true penance, is it not so with your people?”

No, Cassie thought miserably, but she wasn’t entirely sure and it did make a kind of sense she concluded ruefully. “I ’spose,” she sniffed as she followed his gaze to the blank wall in the tool shack. A moment later she was standing with her nose to the wall like a naughty little girl.

*

No amount of analgesic had helped ease her sore bottom and sitting back in the pilot seat of her ship hurt like hell. If one could call it actually sitting. She had opted for taking most of the weight on her lower legs in a kind of leaning crouch. God, I hope no one wants to give me a medical exam when I get back or notices the rip in the seat of my under suit, she thought bitterly.

She watched sullenly as Vandal’s ship dropped back from on her on the monitor. Her adventure aboard had lasted almost two hours and she was now concerned that the retrieval procedure had been abandoned. After all, while her ship was shut down they must have tried dozens of… the train of thought was interrupted by a sudden surge on the console.

“Goodbye Vandal,” she whispered, now strangely sad.

Then the heavens went dark grey and she was gone.

*

“What happened out there?” the tech who opened the hatch asked.

She was aboard the command carrier in Earth space with no clear memory of how she got there. In truth she felt a little woozy and if it wasn’t for the persistent throbbing in her bottom, which had got worse if anything, she wouldn’t have been sure about any of it.

Cassie avoided the man’s eyes as she clambered stiffly from the craft.

“I am not sure,” she said with a shrug, but she was blushing.

“We thought we had lost you,” the man said, his face engraved with concern. “Was it some sort of technical hitch?”

“Some sort of local effect I think, maybe I should go back and investigate,” she suggested. Was she crazy?

“Back there?” he laughed, “Better you than me, come and sit down, you look done in.”

“No thanks, I think I need to stand up for a while,” she answered, her voice brittle.

“I can’t wait to run the tapes,” the tech said excitedly.

“The tapes?” she had forgotten. Oh God, this might get embarrassing.