Free Thrill-Kinky by Teresa Noelle Roberts Page A

wonder if they’d ever put fuel in the Malcolm and food in the galley that way during tight times. She wouldn’t put it past them. Inhibitions weren’t exactly Mik’s middle name, and on Gan’s tropical home planet, clothing was purely for decoration and public sex was only taboo enough to make it exciting.
    Drax smiled. “There’s some questionable footage of me floating around the Galaxinet already, so I wouldn’t much care if Rita doesn’t. But I’ll do what I can to see your crew is suitably recompensed for your trouble.”
    Mik shook his hand. “Deal. We’re all angry enough at being screwed over that we’d do this one for free. Still, paid is better. Plus, fast healer or not, you’re a little battered for holo-porn at the moment.”
    Formalities out of the way—and being teased about sex by Mik passed as a formality aboard the Malcolm —Mik announced grandly, “Buck, make dinner. Rita, fire up the projection device. It’ll actually work for you. It’s time to plot and scheme.”
    Drax was considerably more comfortable now. He’d taken only enough pain blockers to take the edge off, and topicals on the worst wounds, but that helped. Plenty of food and water had done the rest. The food was hardly gourmet, but Buck was surprisingly good at turning nutri-base into something edible by adding spices and a few fresh ingredients. Someone, probably Rita, had adjusted the Malcolm ’s gravity so he felt less weighed down. It wasn’t as low as home, but the improvement was noticeable, and not just for him. Buck was moving more gracefully on his prosthetic. As for Xia, she’d literally been bouncing off the walls until Mik scruffed her like a misbehaving kitten, marched her over to a chair and said, “Play later.”
    She whined, “Oh, Dad! You’re no fun!” and stuck out a slightly fuzzy pink tongue, but obeyed.
    The projection device was an old model. No fancy graphic software, no 3D projections, none of the tools to which Drax was accustomed. Rita just wrote things down on her com-pad, or drew crude pictures that the device translated into something prettier, if not, he quickly realized, necessarily any more accurate. “I wish I still had my com-pad. I had blueprints for the museum and schematics for the alarm system.”
    “But you don’t,” Buck said bluntly. “Welcome to our world. Gotta make do with what’s on the Galaxinet most times.”
    Luckily, while full blueprints weren’t available without more digging than they had time to do, Rita was able to find floor plans of the museum and from those and Drax’s sharp memory, they were able to reconstruct a lot.
    “Are we going in through the skylight?” Xia asked eagerly. “I love that game!”
    Drax twitched his wings. “That was my original plan. There are actually two skylights, one in the front in plain sight of the street, the other facing the flyer bay in the back, and a park that’s usually deserted this time of night.”
    “I like that one!” Xia voted.
    Mik scratched behind one tawny, striped ear, and said, “Good choice.”
    “Dad! I’m not a kitten anymore!”
    Mik explained for Drax’s edification, “Xia was very young when she joined us. I helped her learn to judge which risks will be fun and which will be just plain foolish. Sometimes I forget she’s all grown up now.”
    Drax and Rita smiled at each other before Drax continued, “Yes, the rear skylight’s definitely the better choice. Though if there weren’t likely to be people with guns around tonight, I bet it would be exciting to climb the front of the building to see if any noticed, right?”
    Xia bounced in her seat. “Yes! But if you’re climbing the front of the building just to see if you can get away with it, you do that in daytime so you draw a crowd. This is serious, though, so we’re sneaking.”
    Maybe Xia had rubbed on her a bit too much, Rita reflected, because she had to agree that under the right circumstances, climbing a national monument would