Delivered by the Defender (Kindred Tales)

As though in answer, the mechanical voice said,

“Five. Your cleansing and drying are complete. You have thirty seconds to get dressed and leave the elimination cubical before the cycle starts again.”

Holy crap! Selena gripped her violin case and luggage cube tighter and kept her hand on the door latch. She was not going through all that again! She was going to get out of here and hope that Jess could point her towards a more normal bathroom she could actually use, when they finally found each other.

The latch clicked and the door swung open so suddenly that Selena nearly fell on the floor. She staggered forward a few steps, nearly running into one of the two-faced Ma’shorkan women in the process.

“Do watch where you’re going, bimbap!” the woman’s top mouth—the one on her forehead—said sharply. The bottom mouth simply frowned reprovingly, as the Ma’shorkan woman stepped neatly to one side.

“Uh, sorry,” Selena muttered, feeling embarrassed. She stepped quickly to the sink—which was a long trough across from the rows of stalls—with pale blue liquid continuously fountaining from it. It looked like a long, miniature waterfall which ran the length of the room, she thought, as she put down her pink carry-all cube and automatically stuck her hands under the flow.

All along the long sink, other women were doing the same, she saw. Most of them were Ma’shorkan—though only a few had the strange double-faces—but there were plenty of other alien races represented too. Apparently this was a really popular vacation destination for many species.

Selena noticed that most of them were wearing the same yellow and royal blue Seal of Independence on their wrists that she had on herself. Strangely, though, most of the women she saw had a kind of clear, plastic shield around their Seals. It looked a little like a bracelet that fit over the yellow silk and royal blue Shield, though she couldn’t understand why they were wearing it.

A few women weren’t wearing the Shield that signified their Independence, though. These women had on the same kind of dresses that Kat had made for Selena on her replicator—only the “boob panel” as Kat had called it—had been removed to show their breasts.

But they weren’t completely bare, Selena saw, looking from the corner of her eye at the odd arrangement. Most of them seemed to be wearing a strange assortment of gold or silver chains which circled their breasts and ended in rings of metal, wound around their erect nipples. There was another set of chains connecting the nipple rings in the center and a third, thicker chain, much longer than the rest, hung down from the middle, where they met.

Almost like a leash, Selena thought, frowning. A leash connected to their breasts—their nipples!

The thought gave her a strange, erotic shiver because it reminded her a little of the BDSM novel she’d been reading, where the heroine had been captured and forced to submit to her stern but sexy Master. Thinking about that made her realize she no longer had the paperback book with her. Where had it gone? Had she left it on the shuttle?

“Damn! I must have!” Selena muttered, feeling irritated. Well, it wasn’t like she hadn’t read a hundred other books just like it, she told herself, with a sigh. It was her favorite kind of fantasy—the exact thing that had ended her relationship with Gary, the boring Chemistry teacher. Gary’s idea of kinky sex had been doing it with one of the bedside lamps turned on. When she’d tried to get him to wear a black leather mask and act more dominant, he’d whined about it.

“C’mon, babe—I feel like an idiot in this thing. Can’t we just do it the regular way so I can go watch the game?”

It was at that point that Selena had realized Gary was never going to be the dark, masterful Prince Charming she wanted—a man who swept her off her feet and dominated her sexually until she moaned for mercy.

Soon after that, she had given Gary his walking papers. She had wasted too much time on him already, she decided. It was better to be single and on her own with her kinky, unfulfilled fantasies than stuck in a relationship with someone who didn’t share her same sexual interests.

Selena shook her head, deciding to put both her ex and the lost book out of her mind. Gary was in the past and once she got together with Jess, she’d be too busy to read anyway.

But speaking of Jess, where was her friend? Selena decided she’d better get back to the waiting area outside the gate she’d arrived at, so she could be sure not to miss her.

But just as she was finished drying her hands in a stream of heated air, which came out right above the blue waterfall, she got a strange sensation that someone wanted to talk to her urgently. It was almost like someone knocking on the door to her mind.