by Ros Baxter
He nodded, not trusting his voice.
‘But it appears you served her well.’ She breathed out slowly as she said the words and Reetor’s eyes were drawn, not for the first time in the last two hours, to that chest.
Oh yes, he had done that, and no doubt. ‘It was kind of mutual.’
‘Was?’ Her command of English was perfect; she didn’t miss a trick.
‘It ended some time ago,’ he said shortly.
She gestured at the screen again but then turned back to him, and watched him closely as if she didn’t want to miss a single beat of his response. ‘Do you miss pleasuring her?’
He swallowed and nodded again. ‘And taking pleasure with her.’ The words surprised him; he hadn’t meant to reveal so much. But not as much as the way his voice had sounded — low and husky.
This time it wasn’t the video that had him aroused. It was the situation — the fact that this strange girl had watched it, enjoyed it, and was now asking him about it as she sat there, semi-naked like some Viking goddess, while he was stark naked and chained in the chair beside her. There was an intimacy in the discussions they had been having. She questioned him, but she didn’t let him get away with something she considered an unsatisfactory answer. She pushed hard and demanded to know more, never using her weapons, as she may well have done, but asking further and better questions, her green eyes bright, her throat bobbing with curiosity.
He felt she had stripped him bare more than once in the last two hours.
‘She was your first.’
What the hell?
The girl smiled. ‘I read the file, remember?’
‘They can’t have known with certainty that I was a virgin when I joined the Avengers.’
She studied him hard. ‘There are places in this universe where people play games of chance.’ She twisted a long piece of red hair around her finger again. ‘For money.’
Where the hell was she going with this?
‘In these places the ability to keep a closed countenance is central to winning the game.’ She paused, and smiled. ‘You would be — to use your word — crap at such games. Of course the Avengers would have known you had not been sexed.’
She stood and moved behind him in his seat, placing two hands softly on his shoulders. Her touch was warm where his skin was cool. ‘Just like I could tell, watching you on that file, that you were new to those pleasure arts.’
He breathed slowly as she ran her fingertips from his shoulders up his neck and to his hair. ‘Everyone has to start somewhere,’ he said, going for casual and worrying about his poker face, the one she had just told him was crap.
‘I’m glad you think so,’ she said, dragging her fingernails back down his neck. ‘Just as I am glad that you have recently been initiated yourself. It will help you remember how to go about teaching another.’
Reetor frowned. Was she suggesting…? But surely she was not…?
He should have been horrified, but his brain refused to play. Instead, it told him that this could be just the opportunity he needed to get her disarmed and vulnerable. That was all it was, he told himself. He had no interest in getting down and dirty with this lethal screw-up. Even if her body made him think filthy thoughts and her face made him want to tuck her under his arm and shield her from any more pain.
‘So you’re…’ He searched for the right word. A virgin? Inexperienced? ‘Looking for a teacher?’
‘I want to know how it feels,’ she said, turning his seat so he faced her. She stepped forward so she was standing between his legs. With his hands and feet bound he could not move, but the press of her legs against the inside of his thighs forced them further apart. She was so close he could have stretched out one finger and touched the soft milky whiteness of her belly. ‘I want to know how it feels to mate with one of my own, before I am given to Xhozei.’
Holy shit. Reetor knew whom she was talking about. The Temerite warlord was infamous across the universe for his brutality and his absolute power.
‘He has wanted me for a long time. It is the only way I have been protected from the violence of others.’ She swallowed hard. ‘But nothing in the universe will protect me from his violence once he has me. And I want to take something for myself before the ceremony.’
‘Ceremony?’ Reetor’s voice was a harsh squawk.
‘The wedding,’ she said, stepping back out of his legs. ‘Xhozei likes unusual things.’ She sounded very bitter. ‘I will make a great trophy for him.’
‘So…’ Reetor was working hard at piecing the elements of this together. Somehow in the middle of this whole, horrible story, he needed to find a way to save himself. ‘How would this work? I show you the ropes, you let me go.’
She shook her head and her eyes flicked down to the ground. ‘No,’ she said, shaking her head again but refusing to meet his eyes. ‘I don’t have that kind of power. I let you go, I don’t have a body to show them, and what Xhozei would have done to me will be a pale shadow beside what his lieutenants will do with me once I have betrayed them.’
Okay. ‘So you’re offering me..?’
‘A fast death,’ she said, holding up her laser. ‘And my body before you go.’
There were worst ways to die, Reetor considered, taking in her perfect form.
He also knew agreeing to her deal was his only chance. He needed the chains unleashed; he would get nowhere while they were in play. And then, once that happened, well, she may try to kill him, but they were both warriors. And it would end in one of them dead. Hopefully not him. But after hearing her tale he would never leave her alive for the Temerites and their leader. If only there was some other way.
She turned a slow circle, a metre or so in front of him, shamelessly showing him her back, buttocks, and the sinful length of her legs, before turning frontwards again and running her hands across her chest, over her breasts and down her tummy. ‘I can see you like it,’ she said, her face flushing again. ‘It will be very good between us.’
‘Oh, I don’t doubt it,’ Reetor said, sending his cock a swift message to behave itself. He didn’t want to screw this up by acting like too much of a pushover.
Think unsexy thoughts.
Unfortunately, with her standing in front of him all the ammunition he had ever used to repel an unwanted hard-on — unpleasant teachers, images of Hydrentians — evaporated, and his focus narrowed to this one hot girl, her amazing body and her perfect face. He felt the biggest stiff of his life building in his bloodstream.
But he never had the chance to worry about it.
Because as he watched her, there was the slightest of bumps and a dark shape materialised behind her. She had already reacted before he called out to warn her, spinning and going low, cocking both her blade and her gun at once and making a noise unlike anything Reetor had ever heard. He supposed it was the human version of the Posterei battle cry, but it sounded like a wild, evil ululation, a blood-lustful screech of pain and fury.
The thing that had beamed onto the pod was purple-black and savage. It towered over Klara, a flurry of swinging arms and tentacles. Reetor had never seen a Medusio in the flesh, and his blood felt icy in his veins as this one used one long appendage to knock the girl to the other side of the room and then eyed him off, naked and bound in the chair, with a single yellow vision slit. As his muscles tensed the chains bit harder into his flesh, squeezing at his arteries. He was powerless to help as this thing went down. He could only watch.
He knew that Klara planned to kill him, but he’d rather take his chances with bringing her around than be subject to whatever fate this creature of death might mete out. The Medusio were known to derive sustenance from the pain of other creatures.
Klara had been knocked off balance by the unexpected blow, but she didn’t stay sprawled on the floor for long. She was up and vaulting onto the thing’s back before one of those tentacles could connect with Reetor. The only person Reetor had ever seen vault like that was his old Magister, Kyntura, the one he was on th
is mission to meet. The girl landed on the thing’s back like she was performing a simple stretch, then she reared up, better to drive the blade she was holding high down into its spiked flesh.
But it was too quick. If it hadn’t been so terrifying it would have been fascinating, the way this huge, lumbering thing could move so quickly and coordinate its many limbs so dextrously. A single flick of a tentacle and the petrification blade slid across the floor. Reetor recognised the look on Klara’s face as she watched it escape; she felt naked without it. The realisation hammered home to him just how much a child of Temer this girl really was.
But the look fled quickly. This was not a girl to lose her rhythm so easily. While the thing tried to shake her from its back, she fired the laser into the place Reetor supposed its brain must be. It bellowed but did not fold, undulating its spine in a way that threw Klara from its back and again she crashed to the floor, this time with a sickening crunch that Reetor was sure spelled the breakage of some bones. The thing looked over at the place she laid, but it remained silent and did not advance further on her. Instead, its focus turned back to Reetor, and he could feel the pleasure pulsing from it as it took him in.
He was its target. The thing was here for him. But to kill him, or take him in?
He glanced towards Klara, who was stirring on the floor.
Get up. What would his Magister have said to her, if the girl had been one of her virgins, being trained for their brutal missions? Get the fuck up. Survive.
The thing came towards him slowly, taking its time, savouring the moment. Reetor bucked a little in his chains as it reached out one long, spiked tentacle towards his face. The chains responded to the jerky movement, spearing his flesh with tiny barbs and pushing towards his venous system. He grunted in agony. What would kill him first — the Medusio, or the girl’s binds? He had no doubt the tentacle coming towards him was the death blow; there was something about the deliberate quality of the movement, and the way that particular tentacle was brighter and thicker than the others.
This was it; the end of it all. And what the hell had been the point? He had been born, raised among intergalactic refugees fleeing the shattered Earth, seeking a new home. Then he had known the pain of his foster mother’s death, the brutality of Avenger training, and the experience of being outcast and hunted in a brutal universe after he’d deserted them. Along the way, he had learned that New Earth’s ruling Council was no better than the greedy, power-hungry race that had blown up the earth to serve its own ends. The only respite he had known was a brief time in The Bunker among the Backlash, who, for all their fierceness and conflict, believed there was a better way for the remaining people of Earth.
But what did any of it matter now?
It was all going to end here, at the point of a Medusio’s spur.
He would not cry, and he would not tense at the moment of impact. This was all he had now; his death moment, and he would not give this thing the satisfaction of his tears and his pain as the chains ripped into his veins.
The creature’s vision slit glowed even more yellow as the tentacle stopped a millimetre from his nose. Then it quivered, and he was sure the strike pulsed down it, ready to land on his face. It would be over in an instant. He decided to think about X as he died, that languid, smooth body and the pleasure they had shared. Someone had once told him that in the moment death took you, you needed to pare your awareness down to a single thought, to beat back the vicious edge of terror that would otherwise consume you.
But it wasn’t X who filled that last, ragged thought.
It was the girl, Klara. He had thought it would take an act of God to release him from the grip of his commanding officer. Instead, it had taken a lethal, lost warrior, part curious girl, part cold-blooded deal-maker. He saw her delicate milky-silver skin, her red hair and her greener-than-green eyes. And in that last moment he wished with all that was left of him that there had been time to love her before this thing took him. That would indeed have been a good way to go. He would have liked to pleasure her, to ensure she knew the desire her species was capable of before she submitted to a life of duty and violence.
And now neither of them would have the chance.
He would not cry, he would not tense, but he would not watch either. He closed his eyes and let himself think about the girl’s body as the tentacle flexed and reached for his cheek. Full breasts; the wild tattoo over the marks of her degradation.
Yep, he could die thinking about that. There were worse ways to go.
A shrill scream interrupted his death-dream. As his eyes flicked open he saw the girl, her blade buried deep in the root of the tentacle that groped for his face. The Medusio’s other arms and appendages writhed madly, but it was as though they were blind, incapable of rational movement. Reetor watched as the instrument that would have carried its death to him turned grey and cold, and the rest of the creature followed, like a spreading curse from a fairy-tale. A rancid stench rose from it, part burning flesh, part noxious gas.
The girl limped over to Reetor. ‘It’s the petrification, that smell,’ she explained, eyeing him carefully for injuries. ‘It will pass in time.’
He stared at the thing. ‘Another bounty hunter?’
She shrugged. ‘Probably. It was clear it was you it wanted. I was just in its way.’
He turned his focus on her. She was holding her side, and he guessed she had at least one broken rib. But she also had a hot-red slash down the side of her torso that was not covered by tattoo, just under her shield. ‘It got you.’
She nodded and grimaced. ‘Medusio poison. Very painful.’ She limped over to the seat she had occupied previously. ‘What meds do you have?’
‘Some narcan,’ Reetor said, running a quick mental inventory of his pack.
‘That will suffice,’ she said, closing her eyes as she rested her head against the back of the seat. ‘Where?’
Reetor motioned with his eyes to the pack stow, and with quick, economical movements she found the vial and administered the shot.
‘How is it?’ Her stoicism moved him. Her face was deathly white, all the blood drained from her lips.
‘Getting better,’ she confirmed. ‘But it won’t give me long. Maybe six hours? I’ll need to get treatment.’
He watched as some colour returned to her cheeks and the wound stopped pulsing red across her tummy. ‘You saved my life,’ he said.
She nodded. ‘I told you, you’re worth more to me alive.’
‘But you’d kill me if I gave you what you want.’ What he wanted as well, he knew now. Very much.
‘I would,’ she said, her lips parting in a way that made him wish he were dressed, not so exposed to her all-seeing gaze.
He gestured at her wound. ‘Still? You still want that? Even now you’re hurt?’
She nodded. ‘More,’ she said, breathing in deeply. ‘Death comes when we least expect it. It could have come to me then. I want it more now. I want to know, before I go.’ She turned to him, flicking her hair back over her shoulders. ‘Our lives are short and brutal, those of us with no home,’ she started, frowning, as if she were trying to make sense of exactly what she wanted to say. ‘We need to take our pleasures and our knowledge where we can.’ She shrugged. ‘This is all there is.’
‘Okay,’ he said, nodding slowly at her lest the chains object. ‘Release me and I’ll do what you ask.’ But I won’t die here. Not this day. I have something to do; I promised X that I would, and I’ll not die before I do it.
He would pleasure her, as he’d said. And then he would kill her.
A slow, sensual smile spread across her face at his words, her eyes widening. She shifted her weight in the seat in order to lean forward and release the chains, but before she could, another jolt hit the ship.
Surely not. Did the whole universe know suddenly where he was? Was he somehow unaware that he had some great flashing sign on his head that screamed ‘deserter’?
Or maybe the universe just hated him?
But as quickly as the thoughts of ambush landed, he dismissed them. The crystalair revealed that during the drama they had accidentally wandered into a keloid asteroid cluster, a perilous trail of rock, ash and galactic lava that smashed ships like this one to shards every day of every week. Reetor had navigated through keloid clusters several times, but none of them had been pretty. The clusters were unpredictable, and the rocks that populated them attracted magnetically to ships, so avoiding them was almost impossible.
His foster-mother had been a crack pilot and Reetor had learned the art of flying at her knee. She had pioneered a manoeuvre that saw the pods lock in a strange, symbiotic dance with the rocks, using the smaller ones as a kind of shield as you glided through, finding the path of least resistance. The trick required nerves of steel. And lots of flying practice. Lucky for him, Jintu had made him practice often. ‘This kind of manoeuvre is heart, not science,’ she had said, knowing he trusted science over his heart.
Klara strapped herself in to her seat and worked intently at the controls as they entered the cluster proper. She inhaled deeply as she focused, and her movements were smooth and controlled. Reetor watched while she worked, feeling the rocks crashing on the skin of the pod more frequently and with greater intensity. She was good, her reflexes were perfect, but it was clear she had never navigated through one of these before. Instead of seducing the asteroids she was trying to dodge them, which led them to chase the naked metal hide of the ship with greater desire. It would be torn apart in moments.
As one enormous blue rock crashed into the front of the pod, growing before their eyes through the front scope until it seemed the size of a small planet, the alarm buzzed low and steady through the skin of the pod. Klara continued to work, avoiding looking at him. She was so different from X. X would be hurling insults at the things and locked in frenzied intensity by now.
‘Let me drive.’ He tried to keep his voice even. He could not imagine that this vicious, independent girl would want to be told he was a better driver than she was. The way she looked right now — her whole being concentrated on the crystalair and other instruments before her — it was possible she might turn around and petrify him just for suggesting it. He held his breath as she shot a glance at him.