The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

The military’s plan was simple: use a vertical envelopment pattern to locate and encircle us with beater groups; they expected us, lacking weapons and ammo, to avoid direct confrontation and flee, which would push us toward stop groups who waited to kill from a distance with sniper rifles. Maybe they didn’t want to risk taking us on in close fighting: the Colonel by himself would hand them heavy losses, and I’d already proven my telepathy could punch through their blocker tech, though they probably didn’t know I’d nearly reached my limits and the resulting headache had me nearly mind-crippled. They planned to use a tried and true method to herd us to a killing field where they held the advantage. As long as the Colonel and the Talents ended up dead, the military would accomplish its mission. Obviously, though, I objected to the whole bullet-riddled corpses in the dirt outcome of said mission, and I especially objected to the sheer number of possible futures where Yan’s Talent foresaw exactly that outcome—not in all of them, but certainly in the majority. Mostly, I objected to the part where the Colonel managed to stay alive a whole five minutes longer than me. That just didn’t seem fair.

Oh, and another annoying thing about precognition? Knowing the most likely possible futures isn’t the same as knowing how to make sure they don’t happen.

The Colonel and I conferred off to one side while Jase and Yan babysat each other. I kept my thoughts shielded and rewarded Jase’s occasional attempts at mental eavesdropping with the psychic equivalent of a sharp swat on the wrist. But mostly, Jase kept scanning the jungle for any approaching minds or blocker tech like I’d asked him.

“I agree,” the Colonel mused, though he sounded more like his teeth were being pulled by rusty pliers. Normally, he’d have been practically cumming in his pants at the thought of an upcoming firefight, but something about miniscule amounts of ammo remaining and the part I’d mentioned where we all ended up dead seemed to have drained the fun out of the anticipation.

I had scratched a quick map in a patch of base soil. The Colonel studied it. “If we go this way,” he muttered almost to himself, “does that change the outcome?”

I shrugged. “Don’t know.” Because Yan’s Talent was too episodic—just glimpses—and I had insufficient experience in manipulating it to understand how to turn it toward specific outcomes other than the ones that seemed brightest, or most likely, or whatever. The odds were stacked against us, and we needed to change the game. Unfortunately, thinking of a play that accomplished that fell to the Colonel and me.

The military planned for us to try to take the obvious path, back toward the touristy section of Javennek, where we could hide in crowds or steal a vehicle to get out of town. They also had a contingency plan in case we did something supposedly “unexpected,” like head deeper into the jungle in hopes of evading the trackers in the underbrush, circling around, and finding a populated area where we could steal a vehicle. The military probably already had stealth drones ready to detect us if we pushed farther into the jungle. The problem with “thinking outside the box” is sometimes that’s just another box.

The military had studied the Colonel’s tactics enough to know exactly what he was likely to do—which probably left him secretly impressed but made me wonder whether our career had been as covert as we’d thought. Had someone at the Institute leaked details?

Jase waved to catch my attention, then pointed. Right. A cluster of static was heading our way: the first beater group was getting close.

“We have maybe five minutes to figure something out,” I whispered to the Colonel, “before company arrives.”

Just under six minutes later, four Darven troops in full combat armor came creeping through the underbrush. When they had just passed below us, the Colonel gave the sign, and he and I dropped out of the trees, landing directly behind them.

When the hero does this in the movies, he jumps down from some incredible height, like the equivalent of a three-story building. In real-life, though, a person can’t do that. For one thing, he’d probably break his legs when he landed from that distance, which kind of defeats the whole fight to get out alive purpose. And for another, in most trees, he’d probably hit a few limbs on the way down, which would turn his jump into more of a plummet. Plummeting is definitely not action-hero sexy.

No, the Colonel and I plummeted—er, jumped—from a much lower height, really only a couple of meters above head-level. We got lucky because these soldiers were all two-dimensional thinkers, and no one thought to look up as they approached our position.

One of the soldiers was under the Colonel. The other three were under me as I dropped. How did I get so lucky, I thought.

One of the soldiers sank to his knees just as I landed, and then he toppled face first into the brush. I’d smashed through his blocker field and shut down his mind: telepathically induced coma. He wouldn’t wake up for a few hours, and by then we’d be gone or dead. That left me two soldiers to deal with—and I’d have to do it the physical way because I didn’t have any telepathic juice left to break though another blocker, much less two.

What I did have was the element of surprise, and I used it. Besides, two-to-one odds are pretty damn good for someone who has trained in hand-to-hand combat with the Colonel.

I grasped a club-like length of branch that I’d left there before I climbed the tree and swung it at the knees of the nearer soldier. He sidestepped, but stumbled off-balance and fell, dropping his rifle. My fighting instincts were kicking in; adrenaline and endorphins flooded my bloodstream, helped push back the headache, cleared my head.

Someone, the remaining soldier, went for my head, but I saw him in time to duck. He struck my shoulder hard, the same one Yan’s Ma’m had smacked with her frying pan earlier. I went down under the pain and tried to roll before he could aim his rifle. I landed on the comatose soldier, felt his arm, and traced it. I had just located the soldier’s forearm when one of his still-awake comrades fell at me with a knife. I had enough telepathy left to know where he aimed the blade, and I slid away from it before it would have perforated a few vital organs that I preferred to keep in working order. He slashed at my face, missed, and I fell back on the comatose soldier’s arm again, and there is was. I felt the bulge of his rifle butt under my shoulder when I landed. I rolled and came up with the rifle in my hands and slammed the butt down on Knifey’s wrist, knocking the blade from his grasp. He froze, surprised by how fast I was. That gave me the instant I needed to slam the rifle butt into his face. Knifey went down hard and wouldn’t be getting up for a while.

Which, uhm, left me a wide-open target for the third soldier, who suddenly found himself with a nice, clean line of fire directly at my head.

Even as I turned toward him, something went out in the soldier’s eyes, and he toppled, dropping his rifle. The Colonel stood behind him, barely even sweating. I nodded my thanks to the Colonel. I didn’t know what he had done to incapacitate the soldier, and I didn’t much care. The important facts were that, one, I was still alive—oh, yeah, and the Colonel was alive, too—and two, he and I were now both armed with better weapons and more ammo. Oh, and three, during the melee, Jase and Yan had managed to sneak away as planned and were now outside of the herding perimeter.

The military had not planned on us splitting up. They certainly hadn’t planned on us keeping our best fighters in the battle zone while the other two we should have been protecting used the distraction to head laterally back toward the poorest parts of Javennek where we’d come from.

I’d promised Jase, if we both made it out alive, I’d help relieve his blue balls any way he wanted, just in case he needed an incentive other than not dying to motivate him to go along with the plan.

This wasn’t over for the Colonel and me. Not yet. These beater groups were moving in pairs, one team following the other, in case we managed to overpower the first. The second group was nearly upon us.

Except suddenly there was an explosion some distance away to our left, kinda-sorta in the direction Jase and Yan had been heading, though they couldn’t have gotten that far yet. Followed by rifle-fire to our right, which would have been the second beater group. Just a few shots, but suddenly I couldn’t sense the blocker tech any longer.

I looked at the Colonel, but he was already running through the jungle.

I would have shouted something sarcastic like Remind me again why your first instinct is always to head toward a giant explosion as we ran, but I knew the Colonel would have just yelled back something vaguely insulting like Because I’m not a giant pussy, and I had too big a headache to devote brainpower to coming up with a retort to that. Besides, running from a “certain death” situation and into a “probable death” one is much more likely to be successful if not accompanied by shouting or other loud giveaways that help the pursuers catch up.

The tactic made sense. Explosions made great distractions. As every covert operations mind on the planet knows, when a nice, distracting explosion goes off over here, the real action is happening somewhere else—so go look for that somewhere else, and there’s the real situation. The Colonel wasn’t running toward the explosion, not exactly, but he was heading near it. There’d be a zone of chaos around the location: panicked people, incoming police and aid workers, the gawky curious—probably a bunch of out-clan tourists too, where a pair of non-Darven-clan like the Colonel and I would be less noticeable. If we could get into that zone, we might be able to take advantage of the confusion to steal a vehicle and get away without anyone noticing or recognizing us.

Besides, that was the same general direction Jase and Yan had gone.