Drinking Games: An Assassins Universe Short Story: Assassins Universe

By Kristine Kathryn Rusch

As Rikki tries to shove a dead body out of the airlock on a space yacht, she finds herself stopped by a stunningly attractive man. Not because he wants to arrest her for killing the guy, but because he wants to help her dispose of the body.

Rikki doesn't need help, even sexy blue-eyed help. Yet somehow, she can't get rid of this handsome man, despite the fact that getting rid of people is her job.

The story that inspired Rusch's novel Assassins in Love, which she wrote under the pen name Kris DeLake, "Drinking Games" takes love—or at least lust—to a whole new level.

"A sexy read."

— RT Book Reviews

• Language: English
• Publisher: WMG Publishing
• Release date: Apr 22, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201629427

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

USA Today bestselling author Kristine Kathryn Rusch writes in almost every genre. Generally, she uses her real name (Rusch) for most of her writing. Under that name, she publishes bestselling science fiction and fantasy, award-winning mysteries, acclaimed mainstream fiction, controversial nonfiction, and the occasional romance. Her novels have made bestseller lists around the world and her short fiction has appeared in eighteen best of the year collections. She has won more than twenty-five awards for her fiction, including the Hugo, Le Prix Imaginales, the Asimov’s Readers Choice award, and the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine Readers Choice Award. Publications from The Chicago Tribune to Booklist have included her Kris Nelscott mystery novels in their top-ten-best mystery novels of the year. The Nelscott books have received nominations for almost every award in the mystery field, including the best novel Edgar Award, and the Shamus Award. She writes goofy romance novels as award-winner Kristine Grayson, romantic suspense as Kristine Dexter, and futuristic sf as Kris DeLake.  She also edits. Beginning with work at the innovative publishing company, Pulphouse, followed by her award-winning tenure at The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, she took fifteen years off before returning to editing with the original anthology series Fiction River, published by WMG Publishing. She acts as series editor with her husband, writer Dean Wesley Smith, and edits at least two anthologies in the series per year on her own. To keep up with everything she does, go to kriswrites.com and sign up for her newsletter. To track her many pen names and series, see their individual websites (krisnelscott.com, kristinegrayson.com, krisdelake.com, retrievalartist.com, divingintothewreck.com). She lives and occasionally sleeps in Oregon.

Book preview

Drinking Games

DRINKING GAMES

AN ASSASSIN’S UNIVERSE SHORT STORY

KRISTINE KATHRYN RUSCH

WMG Publishing, Inc.

CONTENTS

Drinking Games

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Also by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

About the Author

DRINKING GAMES

Hands fumbling, fingers shaking, head aching, Rikki leaned one shoulder against the wall, blocking the view of the airlock controls from the corridor. Elio Testrail leaned against the wall at her feet. She hoped he looked drunk.

Things hadn’t gone as planned. Things never went as planned—she should have learned that a long time ago. But she kept thinking she’d get better with each job.

She completed each job. That was a victory, or at least, that felt like one right now.

Her heart pounded, her breath came in short gasps. If she couldn’t get a deep lungful of air, her fingers would keep shaking, not that it made any difference.

Why weren’t spaceships built to a universal standard? Why couldn’t she just follow the same moves with every piece of equipment that had the same name? Instead, she had to study old specs, which were always wrong, and then she had to improvise, which was always dicey, and then she had to worry that somehow, with one little flick of a fingernail, she’d touch the wrong piece, which would set off an alarm, which would bring the security guards running.

High-end ships like this one always had security guards, and the damn guards always thought they were some kind of cop which, she supposed, in the vast emptiness that was space, they were.

Someone had fused the alarm to the computer control for the airlock doors, which meant that unless she could figure out a way to unfuse, this stupid airlock was useless to her. Which meant she had to haul Testrail to yet another airlock on a different deck, one that wouldn’t be as private as this one, and it would be just her luck that the airlock controls one deck up (or one deck down) would be just as screwy as the controls on this deck.

She cursed. Next spaceport—the big kind with every damn thing in the universe plus a dozen other damn things she hadn’t even thought of—she would sign up for some kind of maintenance course, one that specialized in space cruisers, since she found herself on so many of