“No.” Lieutenant Parker said, crossing her arms across her chest. “No way!”
“Come on, Jane, it’s the only way.” Lieutenant Clark replied. “Standing orders in an emergency require staying together. Besides, it’ll take both of us to bring the parts back to the shuttle...assuming we can find what we need at the market. He held up the outfit.
“Fine...but I don’t like it.” Jane replied. With a sigh of resignation, she unzipped her jumpsuit and began to strip...
It had all begun as a routine scouting missing, checking up on the development of the local system and its inhabitants, a species of primitive humanoids just entering their industrial age. A quick zip through the system in upper atmosphere, collecting radio signals, holopics and other data to help chart their progress towards the stars and joining the galactic community. Or it should have been…
A freak spatial anomaly had damaged their shuttle’s systems, sending the two officers crashing to the surface. By good fortune, they’d come down in countryside, remote enough their arrival hadn’t been noticed, but not so far they couldn’t reach the nearest settlement on foot. The planet was still primitive, technologically, but with luck they could find the materials to affect some jury-rigged repairs. Enough to get their subspace communicator working enough for a distress call. The emergency power had lasted long enough for them to fashion rough approximations of the local garb and let them blend in. But that was the end of their good fortune…
Once she was out of her uniform jumpsuit and completely naked, Jane took her costume from Clark and started to slip into it. It was complex and seemed to consist almost entirely of a series of dozens of leather straps which crisscrossed every part of her body, except the ones which mattered. She had to get Clark’s help with many of them, including the ones which locked her arms behind her back in a tight box-tie.
Though the locals here were advanced, technologically anyway, socially they remained regressive compared to most other civilizations. Scholars back on Earth were still arguing about it, but most pointed to a world-wide conflict a century or two ago which had reduced civilization to a primitive, tribal state. The rediscovery of a cache of lost technology had restored them to a level of industrialization, but the effects on society still lingered...
The most notable example of this lay in the dominant culture’s gender relations. Females were, almost universally considered the possessions of the males, first the patriarch of her family, then whichever male purchased her or captured her, as a wife or concubine. To Jane’s annoyance, Clark had picked out the...outfit, if you could call it that, of a middling concubine, the sort a well to do merchant would take with him to show off while on business. And show off, it would...
“Anything else you want too say?” Clark asked, as he finished adjusting the bronze buckles on the straps circling her head.
“I hate this plan.” She said before opening her mouth to accept the metal bit which went between her teeth. It seemed the local feeling was strong that wives, or at least concubines, should be seen and not heard.
While she squirmed in the tight leather straps, fuming, Clark quickly got out of his jumpsuit and into his local clothes, intended to present him as the well-to-do merchant Jane was a possession of. It was a lot like hers, though it at least had a loincloth, made of a rich purple fabric, as well as a broad belt holding a coin pouch, a sheath for a short, slightly curved sword on one side and a holster on the other for one of the local’s primitive slug throwers.
“Oh, one last thing…” Clark said as they opened the shuttle hatch, letting in a hot gust of air, rich with the strange, spiced tinge of the alien world. He picked up one last leather strap from the pile. One end had a small metal clasp on it, which he affixed to the front of Jane’s collar. The other ended in a loop, which he slipped a hand through and took a firm grasp. “Don’t want my concubine wandering off, now do I?”
Jane groaned through the gag as he turned and stepped out of the shuttle. The leash at her neck snapped taut, dragging her along after him onto the savage, alien world...