Thrill-Kinky (10 page)

What she didn’t believe was that anything she was feeling was real, because at this moment she’d swear she was in love with Drax Jalricki, whom she’d known less than a day. That wasn’t possible. Thoroughly infatuated and in lust, yes. In love, no. Any more than he was really in love with her, though she’d bet credits to curium, based on his words, his expression, and especially his kiss, that he fancied he was at the moment. Thrill-kinky to the max. But now that he was cleaned up and dressed, even if he was all history-flash in borrowed clothes rather than sporting the smoothstyle fashions rich people favored, he was acting and talking like what he was.

Which was a guy who wouldn’t normally bother with a tramp-freighter mechanic for more than a quick bit of fun. Any more than a die-hard spacer like her would expect anything serious with a dirtside guy, let alone with a man so attached to the rock where he was born that he’d put his life on the line for it on a regular basis. Drax belonged to Banjal and she belonged to the places between the stars, except for brief visits to see the sites and climb some rocks.

She broke off the kiss first, even though her body was clamoring for more. Drax was in the most danger tonight. The rest of them might be targeted as part of cleaning up loose ends, but the Blemondians already tried to kill him once and that was before the assassin got into the game. “Much as it would be fun to have sex in the San’balese National Museum after hours,” she made herself say, “and trust me, it would, we have work to do. You’re the one who knows what this artwork looks like, so you’re on.”

The
Malcolm
’s crew had a vague idea where it would be based on the sketchy exhibit map on the museum’s Galaxinet site. But it was helpful that Drax knew what he was looking for, because the art in the exhibit was…distracting. The quick glances Rita could afford to take didn’t always let her brain detangle the alien limbs, let alone figure out the piece’s symbolism, but taking a closer look might not be the smartest idea either, not with so little time to waste.

Then they stumbled across the first piece of human art, and it was not at all what Rita would have expected.

No, it was way more disturbing.

Like several of the larger pieces, it was a holo, as the original marble sculpture of Bernini’s
The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa
was too large and yet too fragile to ship from the Old Earth Preserve and Museum. According to the signage, the statue was supposed to depict a holy woman having a mystical experience, but that the sculptor had only known how to convey divine bliss by showing her in the throes of orgasm. The woman was fully dressed in flowing robes, in what the signs explained was an archaic nun’s habit, a symbol that she had taken a vow of chastity. But she didn’t look particularly chaste, though she did look very happy. Her body was arched at the peak of sexual pleasure, her mouth hung open as if she cried out, and her face was lost in a dreaminess Rita recognized as the face of really good sex, the kind where you forgot your name and the boundaries of your body.

The kind Rita had had with Drax.

The woman, Saint Teresa, didn’t have a sexual partner in the usual sense, but a beautiful youth stood near her, pointing a golden arrow toward her belly, or maybe a little lower, in a piece of symbolism so obvious that Buck guffawed.

A beautiful youth with wings.

The winged man, though he was depicted as a slender, pretty youth, not a well-built grown man, captured Rita’s eyes, especially considering the effect he was obviously having on his female companion.

Maybe the warm, soft expression—you could tell it was warm and soft and intimate, the kind you’d like to see on your lover’s face, even though he was carved in marble—with which he regarded the woman was supposed to symbolize the sweetness of divine love, but it looked to Rita like a man taking delight in his lover’s pleasure. The way you do when you love someone.

“Obviously this Bernini fellow never saw a Banjali,” Drax said, dismissively, but Rita thought, almost angrily. “Though it predates contact between our species by eight of your centuries, so that’s no fault of his.” He stalked away, muttering something like, “I think it’s this way.”

Still Rita didn’t move. Only Mik followed Drax, although he did look a little wistfully at the sculpture as he walked by. Even if you were queerbent, Rita suspected, it had power.

Xia broke the statue’s spell. “Is that gold rod an old-time version of one of those auto-stim toys? I
love
those things!”

Everyone laughed quietly and, Rita thought, uneasily. Even Xia’s comment didn’t seem entirely spontaneous.

Rita noticed they all glanced back at that statue at least once as they followed Drax between art from more worlds than Rita had visited, all depicting the act of love.

It
was
love in most cases, Rita realized now, not just sex. Of course it was love. While it was easy to see the festival as being about having a lusty, rowdy time, it had deeper significance. Grand party or not, Kenu Aram was a religious observance; those stripy San’balese romantics believed sexual love was how mortals could comprehend the divine. It seemed the curators planned this exhibit to reflect that aspect of the festival, not the purely fun and playful side she’d seen in the square earlier.

She couldn’t always figure out the configuration of limbs and she definitely didn’t know the stories that some of the artwork was telling, stories that would probably be obvious to someone from the culture. But she could feel the weight of emotion as well as eroticism.

And it was reaching out to strangle her.

Drax’s wings were pulled in tight to his spine so he could navigate among the artwork. Even though the exhibit was spaced to accommodate crowds of stocky quadrupeds, it still felt cramped to him. Or maybe it was the weight of artistic depictions of happy couples that pressed on him.

At the same time that she was putting her life on the line for his mission, Rita was pulling away from him.

Which probably meant she was more sensible than he was. He hardly knew her. They’d been drawn together by necessity and danger, and it had led to passion. But that passion didn’t need to mean anything other than Rita was wired more like one of his people than most alien women he’d met. Thrill-kinky, even by Banjali standards, let alone human ones.

Which meant that if they both survived tonight, they’d be tearing each other’s clothes off as soon as they got a little privacy. Wind and sky, maybe before they found privacy. It was the middle of Kenu Aram, and late at night.

Then they’d go their separate ways. She was part of a close-knit crew that appreciated her and had her back, and she clearly had no desire to live dirtside, as the spacers called it. His superiors in the Banjali Intelligence Corps wouldn’t take it well if he quit abruptly to chase after an alien woman with a background and associates that would probably make the BIC think she was planning to seduce planetary secrets out of him and sell them to the highest bidder.

Which, honestly, he might think if he’d just read dossiers on Rita and her eccentric but surprisingly competent crewmates, not met them.

When he’d seen her tumbling down the face of the museum, his heart had just about stopped and he was in the air without a thought to the security of the mission or his own safety, how obvious his Banjali silhouette would be against the night sky. All that had mattered was protecting Rita.

Which was why when this was all over, he’d take her for a fancy dinner, book a night in the kind of hotel she couldn’t afford and he could only because he was billing it to the BIC, and then he’d leave this planet and her before she got hurt.

And he didn’t mean emotionally.

Belesku was arguably the scariest person who had it in for him, but she wasn’t alone on the list. Hanging around a BIC operative, especially one who had enemies from his criminal past as well, wasn’t necessarily good for your health.

Xia faded into the shadows.

Usually Xia went out of her way to attract attention, but her tawny, mottled coloring proved remarkable camouflage, as good in a weirdly lit, shadowy museum as it had been when Rita had watched her hunt in the desert.

Creepy in a way, but it boded well for her success tonight.

The rest of them moved into position around the dimly lit case that Drax had identified as the correct one. He too lurked in the shadows, Mik’s cloak still wrapped around him so his distinctive silhouette was less obvious. He wasn’t invisible, not like Rita, but a quick glance would suggest a group of four humans, not three humans and one Banjali.

With any luck, that would buy them a little time. Buy Xia a little time to distract or take out Nitari Belesku.

In place now, Rita took a second to look at the artifact that was the center of all this craziness.

Once she took it in, she drew a deep breath and let it out on a sigh. Several of the pieces she’d glimpsed in their brisk walk through the museum had been beautiful, and the Saint Teresa piece had moved Rita deeply, even though she didn’t know who Saint Teresa was.

But the Banjali artifact topped them all.

The painting—Rita thought the correct word might be fresco, because it looked like it was done on plaster or tile—was small, maybe twenty by thirty centimeters, dwarfed by many of the other artworks. Its edges were jagged and uneven, suggesting it had once been part of a larger piece. The more vivid colors had faded with age and the paler ones had yellowed. The whole surface was crazed, as if there’d been a sealant that had cracked over time.

And none of that dimmed its magic.

A Banjali man and woman were flying together, triumphantly naked and clearly having sex. Their faces were tiny, of course, but their expressions were sweet and intimate, and yet powerful. A tiny part of a larger story, Rita suspected, and yet complete in itself.

Light streamed from their bodies, illuminating a night sky.

She sensed movement next to her and looked up to find Drax had slipped in by her side. He was studying her face much the way she’d probably been studying the artifact.

“It’s exquisite,” she whispered to Drax. “As if making love is holy.”

He turned to her with a smile of such poignancy that Rita blinked back tears. It was almost too much to bear, and she didn’t know why. “We call it
Soaring Creation
. It depicts the goddess Lithra and the god Arthaon creating the universe with their love. Before they became lovers, everything except the land of the gods was a dark void. But when they first flew in each other’s arms, light came into being, and as pleasure overtook them, the planet Banjal and all the stars formed themselves where light and darkness danced together.”

“What about the other planets?” Buck butted in. Rita narrowly suppressed the urge to punch him for interrupting what had felt like an intimate moment, with her folded in Drax’s voice as the goddess was in the god’s arms.

But it wasn’t really an intimate moment, was it? Or if it was, it was one hacked out of the midst of the damn craziest job she’d ever been part of.

“The painting is so old we didn’t know about other planets. Telescopes hadn’t been invented, and without a telescope you can’t tell a planet from a star. The story it depicts is even older. Five thousand years old at least.”

“That’s some old all right.” Buck sounded impressed. “My home planet didn’t have nothing that old on it. Oldest stuff was treasures the first settlers brought from Old Earth, and those weren’t more than a few hunnert years. And now that’s mostly gone, with the war and all.”

Drax nodded. “It’s incredible this has survived. Our history has been anything but peaceful. Religious people back home think its survival is literally a miracle and regard it as a sacred relic. Me, I’m not going to go that far, but it’s a unique piece of my world’s history, and I won’t let it fall into the wrong hands.”

Just then, the lights flooded on.

“Gan, now!” Mik all but screamed, though there was no reason to scream if you were using a neurorelay to com. And then, “Police! Someone’s broken into the museum!”

A laserpistol hissed, and Mik jumped as the shot brushed by him.

So much for Drax being inconspicuous. His wings were still hidden by the cloak, but there was no mistaking his golden skin that couldn’t pass for human or most other species, or disguising the distinctive color of his hair.

Xia, at least, was nowhere to be seen.

Looking at the figures striding toward them, Rita couldn’t help hoping the little felinoid had realized she was over her head and snuck away. It would just prove what she’d always suspected, that Xia was the smartest member of the crew.

Two Blemondian men. One must be the good-looking businessman Mik had met, only instead of a smoothstyle suit, he wore expensive-looking black clingpants and clingshirt and had a black hood pushed back, revealing his bald head. Mik had been right that the guy was built. Way too built for Rita’s piece of mind. And his compatriot, who wore urban camouflage and still had his hood up, was even more muscular. Stocky and thick-bodied, like Blemondians tended to be, but only an idiot would mistake it for fat.

One San’balese woman. She wore a museum security uniform—funny how those looked basically the same, other than tailoring differences to suit different species’ bodies, no matter where you went—and couldn’t have been much more ordinary looking. Except she was the only one of the group who had her laserpistols drawn.

One in each of her four hands.

“I wouldn’t shoot those in here if I were you,” Drax said genially. “You might break something.”

“You! I thought I already killed you!” She fired two of her guns, but the well-dressed Blemondian jabbed her with something. Rita couldn’t see what it was, but it made the San’balese woman wince and jump. The shots went wild, sending ceiling tile fragments raining down on them. She let out a low moan.

“Don’t be an idiot,” the Blemondian rasped in the characteristically scratchy voice of his people. “We can’t risk the art. And you-know-who wants to kill that one herself.”

Mik stepped forward, and he too had his weapon drawn—a long whip that looked appropriate with his history-flash clothes. “Would you-know-who be Nitari Belesku, the infamous assassin?” Before anyone could answer, as if they actually would, he swung the whip. The well-dressed Blemondian who seemed to be in charge laughed at the showy, seemingly ineffectual gesture. Until the whip ended up around his neck. That turned the laugh into a strangled gag.