* * * * *
He was right. Clothes did, as old legend said, make the man. Glancing at his reflection in the mirror at the tailor shop, Conan admired his image in snug black boots, tight breeches and the bright-blue tunic he’d chosen.
A s he stepped outside and mingled unnoticed in the crowd, he turned his thoughts to Nebula. She would be his mate and together they would face this brave new world.
But not yet. Not anxious to tempt the fate that would await him if he were to be found out while wearing his new clothes on Obsidion’s strip, Conan went back into the shop and took them off. He looked at his naked body in the mirror, no longer shocked at the sight of his glowing, neon-veined cock. Sighing, he lifted the eunuch’s robe and put it back on, adjusting the hood to cover his head and block out some of the pitying stares.
Until he left with Nebula for Luna Ten, he would endure the shame that enveloped him along with the thick, all-encompassing fabric.
“Have this clothing sent to Conan at Yolanda’s Resort, please. My Master will want it when he arrives.” Chapter Five
A n hour later Conan settled in at Yolanda’s. A s soon as a courier brought the clothing he had bought, he put the uniform back on.
It had been a long time since he had stayed here, a year or more before his mutilation and exile, long before he’d decided to risk himself to save his brother. He recalled his first trip to Obsidion, when the imposing hotel had still been a pleasure palace known as the Gates of Hell.
Idly, Conan picked up a brochure from a nightstand and leafed through it. He saw Yolanda had retained the main public dungeon he remembered. Reading further, he gathered that she had also created new, smaller dungeons that apparently catered to every perversion known on Earth and a few kinks Conan had never heard of.
On past visits, he had pleasured a bevy of willing submissives and their eunuch slaves. Now he only had to please his future mate.
Nebula. Pretty name. Conan looked at himself in the mirror.
Yes, he liked how he looked in the uniform.
But damn it, he’d forgotten about his hair. A s much as he would prefer meeting Nebula while wearing the uniform, he slipped the voluminous white robe over it and arranged the hood to conceal the closely shorn hair on his head.
I don’t want to shock her right away.
Maybe he should have stopped by Leander’s and had his head waxed. Now, though, it was too late.
Shedir had told him that he and Guy would be arriving at twelve hundred hours with their mates. A nd his. The plan was for them all to take a short holiday, have Pak Song recheck Guy’s bionics and avail themselves of the exotic wares in Obsidion’s shops, considered the most exclusive in the galaxy. They would enjoy their respective mates in the arousing atmosphere of the hotel’s renowned dungeons before returning home to Luna Ten for the formal mating ceremony between him and Nebula.
Conan laughed, though it certainly wasn’t funny that the ceremony would be a farce because it was supposed to ensure fertility. That wouldn’t be a possibility, not for him and not for Nebula. He had agreed to go through with the public mating because he thought of it as an acknowledgment of their physical limitations before the entire population of Luna Ten. It didn’t please him to know the ritual would be repeated, admittedly with less pomp, every time they returned to the fucking glade and joined the others in the sex ritual that Shedir had described.
Conan recognized the ritual for what it was—a holdover from the Old Order on Earth, before the Fall and before the Federation rulers had seized power and imposed their ironclad rules, supposedly to prevent the spread of the mutant gene introduced by the first wave of alien invaders.
Restless, he strode to the window and discovered it overlooked the hotel entrance. What time was it? Lifting his bionic hand, he checked his chronometer. Guy and Shedir should be coming soon with their women—and Nebula.
Conan saw them conversing with one another as they approached the resort’s open gates. Shedir, he’d have known anywhere from his swarthy skin, and the fine sheen of his freshly shaved, well-oiled skull—but mostly from the swagger that said louder than words that he was a man, an Earthling of the ruling class who bowed to no one. Once Shedir had shown respect to Conan as his superior officer, but Conan had known and respected the young subordinate, too. He had known Shedir was destined for greater things once he gained a degree of experience at Star Command.
Guy looked different. Fearsome. Conan had noticed his former colleague’s scarlet, bionic eyes when they met a month ago in Pak Song’s workroom, but now those eyes glowed as brightly as the large, multifaceted rubies in his nostril and ears. A ll that scarlet glow unnerved him, until Conan remembered he, too, was not as he’d been before.