by Hondo Jinx
An explosion of bright cogs and levers and spinning wheels filled Brawley’s mind, sparking and steaming, then whipped away as the psionic borealis plunged into his deeper mind, and the crevasse slammed mercifully shut.
Brawley slurred an indistinct expletive and tumbled sideways, consciousness thinning to an uncertain membrane between wakefulness and dark oblivion.
Beside him, Frankie lay sweaty and glowing with fresh power, happily broken and running hot.
Their psionic energies had bound, gear to gear, and fallen into smooth and eternal rhythm not only with each other but also with Brawley’s other wives, who were no doubt themselves recovering at this very second from spontaneous and shockingly powerful simultaneous orgasms.
He grinned at the thought—and passed out.
The next thing Brawley knew, he was sputtering back to wakefulness.
How long he’d been out, he didn’t know. He lay on his back. His newest wife was kneeling between his legs, administering a curious but not unpleasant form of resuscitation. Frankie gripped him by the root, pumping with both hands as she deep-throated his semi-hardness, sucking for all she was worth.
Brawley lifted his head, returning to himself, and grew hard watching her, aware of the constant drain of semen spilling from her loins to join the pearly puddle beneath her legs.
That had been the bonding of all bonding, an explosion that had pitched him halfway to heaven.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Mmhm,” she affirmed, still sucking and pumping as if her life depended on it.
“That was incredible, darlin.”
Her mouth popped free of his erection, which had swollen to full hardness again. Lower down, he could feel his balls refilling, glowing with Carnal force.
“I lost my mind,” Frankie gasped. “I love you so much, Brawley.”
“I love you, too, Frankie,” he said, drunk with affection toward this woman and his other wives, whom he could feel out there, radiating love for him and Frankie.
“I love the girls, too,” Frankie blurted. “I love them all so much. And I feel electrified with power. It’s amazing!”
“Yeah, bonding will do that,” Brawley said, and glanced at his psi score, which had ratcheted up to a mind-blowing 211 points.
His five open strands together now packed an amazing 1055 points of power.
Frankie’s big boost had apparently made her horny, because all the busty Gearhead seemed to care about was milking him dry. As she sucked, she dropped a hand between her legs and fingered herself hard and fast, loudly squishing the wet mess of their mingled fluids, pushing his seed back inside her. Popping her mouth free, she moaned, “I wanted you to fill me up. I wanted you to breed me.”
“I wanted that, too, darlin,” Brawley said.
“But now,” she said, leering up at him from between his legs, “I want you to fill my stomach.”
She plunged her mouth back over him, sucking and pumping, sucking and pumping, moaning and slurping and shuddering, as she surrendered to the insatiable lust of a freshly bound wife.
Brawley watched her for a time, studying the play of moonlight across the sweet curves of her delicious body, which shimmered with perspiration as she sucked and masturbated. Frankie was so alive, so unbridled, so human in her frantic quest for his semen.
Brawley leaned his head back, aware that something was happening within his mind, which filled with mechanical whirring, as if powerful engines had come to life in the darkness. Gears spun, spinning belts and cranking arms back and forth, back and forth, and great jets of steam huffed like unseen geysers in the far recesses of his mind.
It was strange and exhilarating. Then, suddenly, sorrow washed over him.
Because all at once he was aware of the vastly damaged D8 crawler dozer slouching nearby. He felt the machine in his mind and his heart, felt its sad plight and sensed its disappointment.
The D8 had lived only to labor. It was the epitome of the faithful workhouse, undaunted after all these years, doing anything asked of it and requesting only fuel and maintenance in return, a selfless entity that defined strength and reliability.
And Blanton Cherry had dispatched assassins to murder this loyal, lovable dozer. On Cherry’s orders, these men had frozen the D8’s engine solid, cracking the great heart in two.
Fresh rage boiled over in Brawley’s own heart, and he wanted to cut through Cherry like a chainsaw. He vowed to resurrect the sadly fallen D8 but resisted the urge to plunge deeper into its perspective, sensing on some level just how dangerous that might be.
For just as new Seekers needed to resist the seductive trap of curiosity, he understood that as a new Gearhead, he needed to avoid slipping into a roaring world of rocking levers and spinning belts and internal combustion.
All around him, he could sense machines and electricity and invisible waves sizzling across wires and through the air itself.
Nearby, he felt the cube fridge humming, squat and simple, lovable as a dim but happy hound in its dumb devotion to keeping things cold.
His mind hopped to an even simpler yet far more serious machine, the dogged windmill squeaking out in the darkness, tirelessly drawing life-giving water from aquifers far below the surface just as it had, Brawley’s Seeker strand informed him, drilling into the past and hauling up the windmill’s history, since 1893, when—
Brawley cut the flow of information, silencing his Seeker strand before it fell fully into league with his thrumming Gearhead strand and whipped him away into an oblivion of historical trivia.
His mind fired again, zipping to Frankie’s smartphone, but as soon as he tried to connect, an explosion of light filled his head, and his consciousness recoiled violently.
Frankie popped her mouth free again. “Sorry, Brawley. My phone’s protected. Which is good news. Because right now, it would be too much. Don’t lose yourself, okay? I’m trying to distract you down here.”
“Thanks, darlin,” he said, but his mind went away again, sucked into the collective tractor beam of countless machines now clamoring at the edge of his consciousness.
The whole world was lit up with electricity and set to the music of thrumming engines. A forest of poles and towers covered the planet with its triple-canopy of high-tension wires, coaxial cabling, and buzzing waves of information. Down below, a kudzu of fiberoptic webbing crept ceaselessly on, connecting everyone and everything; while overhead, countless satellites circled, broadcasting constant static, carpet bombing the entire Earth with data.
Brawley was both mesmerized and aghast. Madness trembled an inch away. Half a breath. A quarter of a blink.
He hauled violently back from the edge, suddenly aware that Frankie was talking to him again.
“Pay attention to me, sweetie. Focus on what I’m doing down here, okay? Block out the machines and do your job.”
He hesitated, knowing she was right but still badly distracted by the machinery. Her phrasing puzzled him. “My job?”
And then Frankie saved him, muting the electronic siren song by answering his question with the most powerful command in the world: “Cum in my mouth.”
Some time and several climaxes later, Brawley’s inflamed mind settled, and with Frankie’s help, he got on top of the machines and regained his balance. He could feel them out there, but they had lost their seductive power. It would still be easy, if he wasn’t careful, to slide too deeply into a machine, but he had gained perspective and felt confident now reaching out to examine one machine at a time.
His consciousness whizzed through his trailer, pinging from machine to machine with all the rapidity of a microwave particle. Then he poured his awareness into the power lines and zipped away, riding westward until he felt a line branch away.
Here, he paused, querying his Seeker strand. Was this the widow’s ranch?
Yes.
So he shot out this smaller line, intending to do a little do a little investigating. But an instant after leaving the main power lines, everything went black as if someone had
flipped a breaker, killing the line he’d been riding.
“Cherry cloaked the line to the ranch,” Brawley told Frankie, who had finished getting dressed.
“Actually,” she said, handing him his clothes, “it sounds like a Gearhead firewall. Common practice. Gearhead data thieves use power lines all the time.”
Brawley nodded, thinking as he got dressed.
Off to the west, another explosion boomed. They had been less frequent and more sporadic tonight. Why that was so, Brawley had no idea. But he intended to find out.
Because this whole deal was gnawing at him. What those sons of bitches had done to the D8 was bad enough, but his gut told him they were only getting started. And he sensed that drilling into the nature of Cherry’s business was the key to initiating proper action.
Which suited him just fine. Because he was tired of sitting around, waiting and wondering, reacting instead of acting.
It was time to take the damn wheel.
Pulling on his boots, he said, “Well, if I can’t snoop with my Gearhead strand or Seeker juice, I reckon I’m just gonna go over there and take a look with my own two eyes.”
Unless…
He flicked his mind back to his place and dove into the Winnebago. He smiled, instantly understanding Frankie’s affection for the big RV, but didn’t let himself get distracted.
Tightening his focus, he scanned the Winnebago, located his target, and brought the small machine to life.
A short time later, he heard it approaching.
Seeing its red eye, he toggled his view, opening the machine’s perspective alongside his own, holding both sensory feeds simultaneously in his mind like two screens viewed picture-in-picture.
In this way, he saw the approaching drone and, through the drone’s camera, saw himself watching its approach.
The dual view kindly bothered his head, so he detached from the drone’s point of view and brought it down into his waiting hands.
Brawley smiled down at the amazing little machine, then looked to the west. Finally, he was going to do some real recon.
26
“Wow,” Frankie said with an impressed smile. “How did you do that? I mean, I know how you did it, but how were you able to figure it out so quickly?”
“I don’t know, darlin. The more strands I crack, the easier I seem to be able to use them.”
“Like learning languages,” Frankie said. “The more you learn, the easier you pick up new ones.”
“If you say so,” Brawley said, and accessed his Seeker strand, drawing enough force to cloak the drone. He was getting better at cloaking, more economical and more artistic.
He didn’t blot out the drone completely. If he did, and some keen-eyed fucker noticed something, the whole illusion might fall apart. So instead, he muted the noise and visually disguised the machine as a large owl. No one would question the sight of a great horned owl rushing silently through the night, hunting the prairie.
Brawley slipped into the drone’s perspective and took off across the range. Flying was a rush. He tested the drone’s capabilities, fluctuating speeds and altitude, banking this way and that, scaring the living shit out of mice and rabbits as he whipped past, flying mere inches over the stony ground.
Simultaneously, he released a trickle of Seeker juice, reading the terrain and reducing his chances of slamming into anything. In time, he could engineer a radar system for the drone, allowing him to fly blind like a bat.
If he programmed an onboard chip to coordinate with that radar system and several audio inputs, he could also analyze enemy locations by the juxtaposition of sounds and barriers and other factors like the trajectories of shots fired. The drone could report enemy coordinates, and using Seeker and Unbound energy, he could smash hidden enemies with lightning bolts of telekinetic force.
As he zoomed over his property line into Widow Callahan’s acreage, his curiosity grew. Finally, he was going to figure out what this sketchy bastard was up to over here.
He saw a large portion of the widow’s Angus herd massed upon the prairie like so many displaced refugees.
He considered locking onto them with his Bestial energy and strafing them with calming force, but an explosion sounded in the distance.
Brawley pointed the drone in that direction and, coming over a rise, saw a bunch of twinkling lights. As he drew closer, he realized that the lights spread over a pretty good stretch of ground. Buildings came into view. Then he saw vehicles and machinery, some of it quite large, points of light spangling a silhouette that scaled thirty or forty feet into the air.
What are you up to, Cherry? he wondered, banking wide and looping south of the operation.
He saw trailers and sheds and heavy equipment at work, everything half-screened by dust rising from the mouth of the massive hole yawning at the center of the lights and commotion.
Despite the dust, Brawley saw enough to recognize the operation as a quarry, though he couldn’t say what, exactly, this night-shift crew was quarrying. Stone, probably, or perhaps sand, which had been in high demand since the most recent Permian oil and gas boom.
He circled, dipping lower, and watched a bulldozer use its rear-mounted ripper arm to break up a pile of recently blasted rock.
Above the quarry, a wheel loader dumped a massive scoop of what sounded like rocks into the first tri-axle in a line of four huge dump trucks. The truck jostled beneath the heavy load. Reddish dust rose from the bed and drifted off in the night breeze.
This was a big operation.
He and Pa had wondered if Cherry was mining over here, but Pa had dismissed the notion since no one had seen trucks coming or going.
Now Brawley understood why.
The freshly loaded truck gave a blast of its horn and rolled slowly forward, passing under a high skeletal arch of what looked like scaffolding that straddled the wide gravel road.
Just like that, the truck was gone.
Brawley flew lower, told himself he knew the truck was still there, and the tri-axle wavered into view again. Though even with his skeptical focus, the truck remained vague and shadowy like a child’s sketch done in charcoal.
Cherry had rigged some kind of cloaking machine to disguise a big quarrying operation that was running night and day.
Why go to all this trouble?
It certainly wasn’t about permits. Brawley reckoned it’d be easier and cheaper to just buy off the necessary officials, especially given that Cherry was a Seeker.
Maybe Cherry wanted to keep anybody from checking the mineral rights and discovering the less-than-scrupulous way he’d gotten the land.
Could be. But Brawley reckoned there was more to it than that.
The answer, his gut told him, was in the truck.
He wheeled away from the quarry and followed the shadowy tri-axle.
Brawley was determined to discover what they were mining. Maybe Cherry had unearthed some heavily regulated resource, like uranium and was making a quick buck, laws and danger be damned.
Flying directly over the truck, Brawley dipped lower and lower, trying to see what it was carrying. But it was no good. Beneath the blurry cloak, a metallic lid covered the bed of the big truck.
Damn.
Off to the left, the Callahan place was all lit up. And not just the Callahan place. A few hundred yards off from the old ranch house was a cluster of double-wides, maybe a dozen of them in all.
The trailers had no windows. Just a single door. Overtop each of these doors burned a single light. Some were green. Others were yellow, red, or blue. One looked silver. Another, toward the rear of the small lot, burned purple.
This was all strange enough, but what really bothered Brawley was the fence surrounding the trailers. The fence was at least twenty feet high and topped in a snarl of razor wire.
A pair of pickup trucks and a slick BMW sat in a dirt lot just outside the fence gate, where the silhouettes of two men stood talking beside what looked like a sentry shed.
What the hell wa
s going on here?
The fenced-in cluster of trailers sure didn’t look like housing for quarry workers. It looked like a detention center or prisoner of war camp.
Down below Brawley, the big truck bumped loudly over the rough road, which, despite being spread with gravel, had clearly taken a beating from the constant flow of heavy trucks.
Jerking his camera downward, Brawley saw the truck’s cloak shimmer and fray. For an instant, he saw the big tri-axle clearly, but then the cloud of dust dislodged by the bump lifted, obscuring his view.
And suddenly the drone spun out of control. Brawley’s view turned to static, and he lost control.
“What is it?” Frankie asked from beside him.
Before he could answer, his perspective returned abruptly to the drone, which was spinning wildly over the field, losing altitude rapidly.
Brawley hauled back with his mind, gritting his teeth. At the last second, he pulled the drone out of its whirling nosedive and angled sharply upward, clawing for altitude.
But it was too little too late.
He had avoided the ground but was hurtling straight at the high fence surrounding the trailers.
“Son of a bitch,” he growled, angling hard.
One of the sentries pointed at him. “Owl!”
Brawley cleared the fence but crunched to a stop, tangled in razor wire. He winced, feeling pieces of the drone snap away. He felt no pain, only sympathy and regret and a profound sense of loss. The poor drone. There was no way in hell he could free it from the clutches of the razor wire, let alone fly back to the ranch.
Which, he now realized, was a major fucking problem.
“Dumbass owl hit the damn fence,” one of the sentries laughed down below.
A deep voice said, “That’s not an owl.”
Son of a bitch, Brawley thought. He tried to break the drone free but couldn’t.
“Yeah, it is,” the first man said. “Or at least it was. Now it’s just fucking dead.”
On the other side of the fence, one of the trailer doors banged open beneath a blue light, and a gorgeous blonde in a short kimono of blue silk leaned out, smiling nervously. At first, Brawley thought she was wearing a neck brace. Then he realized it was a psi hobble.