The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

Assignment: Futurist

by Wrestlr

4.

The Colonel drove, naturally, while I phoned the logistics staff at the Institute to set up a last-minute change to depart from a different airport in another part of Darven, just in case the government had people waiting for us at the original. And wow, the logistics staff as usual did not like last-minute changes, though successful retrieval of the precognitive certainly would make up for the inconvenience.

You’ll see them again , Yan had said. No time to think about that now. I had to stay focused on appeasing this cranky logistics clerk to convince him that, yes, our departure plans really did need to be changed.

Soon, Yan had said.

If you go with them ...

That’s the problem with precognition. Knowing a few facts about how possible futures might happen was only part of the picture.

I was pretty sure I knew the who. There were only two people, other than the Colonel, that I thought about a lot. If Yan meant who I thought he meant, the how and where and when parts would drive me nuts if I stopped to think about them right then. But was he really talking about who I hoped he might be? Was that even possible? Had I caused him to see something further out than his usual twenty-four hour window? Or, had I screwed up his accuracy, and what he’d foreseen wouldn’t happen at all? He was untrained and hardly infallible. Did he even understand what he was seeing with his Talent half the time? Ugh. Too many questions. These were just some of the reasons I was glad precognitives were rare. Plus, I’ve never been one for wallowing in introspection.

My head was already aching enough from the strain of punching through the blocking field earlier. Good thing I had dealing with a pissy Institute desk jockey to distract me from my headache and all these questions.

I sat in the front passenger seat, alongside the Colonel. Junior and Yan shared the back seat. Junior leaned forward and pointed. “There. Turn there.”

“What?” the Colonel and I chorused. Because the Colonel has the car pushed to the fastest safe speed on that gravel road, and a detour down the coming-up-fast side route Junior indicated wasn’t on our itinerary.

“Yan’s a precog,” Junior said, as if that explained everything. “Turning there is our best chance for living.”

Oh.

The Colonel immediately swerved toward the side road.

Half a second later, a particle beam from overhead cut across the main road, directly through the path our vehicle would have taken if we hadn’t turned.

The Colonel angled the car too sharply, and it went off the loose rock, though he managed to stop short before his side of the car would have crashed into the trees lining the shoulder. The car stalled, and the Colonel immediately had his door open and rolled out into the cover provided by the forest-side of the car body.

Timing it a little fucking close, aren’t you? I thought at Junior as I fell out of my door and scuttled around to the forest side of the car too. I had my pistol out and searched the skies for whatever had fired that particle beam at us. Where the fuck did the backwater Darven military get energy weapon technology anyway? But first, my more immediate question for Junior: How’d you know?

I’ve been reading Yan’s thoughts. Didn’t you check his last flash?—the one he had as you were deactivating his Talent?

Actually, I hadn’t. I’d been too distracted by what Yan said just before that. Fuck, I’d nearly gotten us all killed. If Junior hadn’t been poking around ...

Worry about that later. Junior by then had rolled out the Colonel’s side of the vehicle and dragged Yan along with him. Yan giggled quietly to himself, still euphoric, as something flashed by overhead.

“Stealth hover-drone,” the Colonel hissed. “Using an A.I. to target us.”

Telepathy isn’t just useless against killer robots. It’s also useless against killer drone aircraft and the artificial intelligences piloting them too.

Our pistols were pretty much useless against the drone—it moved too quickly, like a hummingbird. The trees made getting a clear shot difficult, and the damned thing could probably withstand anything short of an armor-piercing bullet. Maybe the Colonel had a point about pyrokinetics. That kind of firepower would have come in handy right then.

The drone zipped by overhead again. By now it probably had already relayed our coordinates back to its base.

“Probably targeting us with infra-red. We can’t stay here.”

On the other hand, we weren’t exactly equipped for a wilderness adventure-hike through the jungle either. Stumbling through the undergrowth meant a high likelihood of getting delayed until the inevitable government forces showed up. Assuming the military didn’t just fire-bomb that section of the forest to save themselves the effort of hunting us down.

The drone suddenly appeared for another pass. The Colonel and I fired at it, trying for a lucky shot, as Junior dragged Yan down to safety behind the car body. The particle beam seared down at the other side of the car as the drone flashed by, barely over the treetops. Both tires on the far side of car popped and sank. Fuck!—the drone had disabled our transportation. Now our options really were limited to either staying pinned down behind the car or making a run for safety in the jungle. If we stayed there, the A.I. would likely target the vehicle’s fuel tank next, in an attempt to kill us in the explosion. If we ran for it, the drone could probably still track us through the jungle and, even if it couldn’t get a shot at us, would help the government troops inevitably hunt us down. Junior and I might be able to take out some of the troops from a distance, assuming they weren’t all shielded by blocker tech, but we had our limits. The Colonel was good, probably good enough to get himself out of there, maybe Yan too, but he might decide some collateral losses were acceptable—meaning Junior and/or me. Being a collateral loss didn’t appeal to me.

Any hope of not being a loss, collateral or otherwise, started with getting the fuck away from this killer drone. “Options?” I asked, just in case the Colonel saw some escape route I didn’t.

The drone started its next run, coming in slower now, going for the kill. The Colonel and I smartly opted for shooting at it. We’d converse later.

The particle beam seared at the back of the car, ripping through the truck and then the passenger area. I wasn’t terribly concerned about the passenger area, since we weren’t in it any longer, but I was willing to bet the Colonel’s spare firearms and the extra ammo were in the trunk. Which meant we were now down to whatever ammo we had on our persons—which wasn’t much. At least it wasn’t much for me.

Another pass, and the beam would rupture the fuel tank.

Junior was moving as the drone neared the nadir of its arc at us. He threw something which I first thought was going wide of the target—the phrase throws like a girl came to mind—but turned out to be almost exactly in the drone’s flight path. The object didn’t hit the drone, but it was just a few yards away from the drone when—

I realized what I was seeing and dove down behind the car. All I could think was, Where the hell did Junior get a grenade?

—when it exploded. The blast wave shoved the drone off-course and downward, where one wing clipped a tree trunk, which spent the craft spinning it into another. The drone broke into at least three pieces and fell toward the jungle floor. At least one of those pieces was on fire.

Fortunately we were all still temporarily deafened by the blast, because I couldn’t think of anything to say.

I took it from one of those Darven soldiers we fucked, Junior thought to me, answering the question that I had apparently mind-shouted at him. Hmm, so that obscene lump in his shorts earlier hadn’t been just blue balls. He must have stashed the grenade in his crotch. Thought it might come in handy. Apparently I was still throwing questions, because Junior added,I turned Yan’s Talent back on and used it to know when and where to throw.

Well, give Junior—Jase, I made a mental note to start calling him Jase because I was sure as hell going to remember his name after this—another cookie. Hell, he deserved the whole fucking box of cookies.

By then, my hearing was coming back after the explosion. At least I could hear the sounds of the burning drone wreckage.

I put my hands on Yan’s shoulders. As I slipped into his mind again, I said, “Let me borrow your Talent for a moment. I need to find the best way for all of us to get out of here alive.”