Chapter 1

Claire, as usual, was actually both fundamentally quite right and yet technically absolutely wrong. Our mine at Hines Ranch Crater is actually 55 miles west of Aphrodite, Texas, as the crow flies and according to Google Maps. Ok, if you want to get picky, our security gate on the private ranch road measures in right at 52.6 miles from town, so rounding up the mileage math, the boundary of our property technically was about 53 miles west of Venus ... well, Aphrodite anyway. Same thing I suppose. I won’t quibble about that fact. No one ever won an argument with Claire anyway.

No one else would have cared ... except for Claire. She had a thing for the 80’s New Wave band The B-52’s anyway and had spent most of the earlier inbound trip to Aphrodite singing “Planet Claire”, over and over and over again. And rather poorly, I might add. Claire might just be one of the five greatest living experts in insect genetics and molecular biochemistry but she couldn’t carry a tune to save her life. That never stopped her from continuing to try, and with loud enthusiasm.

Anyway, we hadn’t even made it out of the parking lot of the Sam’s Club in Aphrodite before she’d loaded into the van’s CD player another one of her mix tapes, this one with a dozen alternate studio and live mixes of ‘53 Miles West of Venus’. The album version, the alternate unreleased album version, the extended EP version, the extended-extended dance club version, then umpteen various live performance versions ... none of which sounded significantly different at all to my untrained ears.

I sighed and kept the van pointed west, towards home and the promise of eventual auditory freedom.

After about ten minutes I was getting good and ready to mash my finger into the player’s eject button and fling her mix disc out into the desert, but by then I had other distractions. For starters, Claire now had her sandals off and her petite bare feet up on the dashboard of the van and was absorbed in the process of painting her toenails some lurid shade of screaming pink. This was probably quite distracting enough for me as the driver but the added view of her sundress bunched up right up to her waist displaying the entirety of her tanned and widely spread bare thighs, and a nearly full display of her pink thong panties, made any other irritations quite irrelevant for the moment.

As for the other distraction, even Claire self-absorbed as she invariably was, noticed I had spotted our tail behind us and took her eyes off of her toes long enough for a quick glance at her side view mirror.

“White SUV trailing behind us,” she muttered at me, then bending her ankles and thighs wider apart yet a bit more to better reach and paint her left toenails. This had the additional bonus of allowing me an even clearer view of her crotch in all of its pink glory, both the skimpy panty and the very unsubtle suggestion of the shape of her delicate (and quite smooth shaven) vaginal lips beneath.

I decided not to rise to the occasion, ha ... ha ... and I tried to ignore the not very subtle hint of what she’d prefer for us to be doing alone out in the desert this afternoon.

Claire, as I mentioned earlier, is a rare scientific genius but she has more than a normal blonde’s share of idiosyncrasies and ditziness ... not to mention that she has the morals of a man. She likes sex... a lot ... and is aggressive to say the least about obtaining it regularly and not terribly choosy about with whom she’d do it with. I was just about the only man (or woman for that matter) left that hadn’t slept with her at least once. She was certainly pretty enough, petite and blonde with a more than adequate chest and being not quite yet thirty-five she was fairly close to my own age. She was also the girliest ‘girly-girl’ I’d ever met in my life who always wore dresses or skirts (usually pink) and never jeans, slacks or even shorts. Her voice was a bit high pitched but it had a very sweet melodic lilt to it, except when she giggled, which she was unfortunately constantly prone to doing. She’s also one of the most vain women I’ve ever met, refusing to regularly wear her Med-Alert wrist band warning of her bee-sting allergy because she considers the bracelet ‘ugly and tacky’. I guess there aren’t many bees down in the bottom of old mines anyway.

So, I’d decided for the tenth time or more that I needed to keep resisting her advances. Regrettably, I was her boss and I was very old-school about the written and unwritten rules concerning screwing your subordinates. It almost never works out well in the long run ... not to mention it could conceivably get the company sued when (not if) the relationship got ugly.

Frankly, almost no one back at corporate would have cared in the least if I had banged every gal at the mine ... but in my opinion it’s asking for trouble. We’re doing some really important and very sensitive work and ex-lovers creating drama on the job wouldn’t be good for anyone. Ok, this meant that I was probably the only one not getting any regular loving ... but that’s why I’m also getting nicely paid to be the project manager.

Come to think of it, Claire probably makes about five times what I do ... but then again she is one of the top five insect geneticists there is to be found anywhere. Push comes to shove – as an industrial chemist I’m regrettably fairly replaceable. Claire probably isn’t ... and for me that meant look, but sadly don’t touch.

Anyway, I’d seen that same white SUV follow us right from the Sam’s parking lot about ten minutes ago. I’d also seen it lurking at a distance at both the post office, Wal-Mart and Wells Grocers back in Aphrodite earlier that morning. This was a deliberate tail ... and it had now occurred at least three weeks in a row.

Working in an old mine far out in the desert an hour away from anything resembling civilization, it’s hard to get any sort of deliveries, especially enough quality grub to feed a staff of about thirty. Delivery options? Almost none, so we have to get everything perishable like meat and produce ourselves. Our job is difficult and the living and working arrangements are less than ideal so we try and compensate by having decent meals served at least six days a week by a competent chef. So every Saturday morning for the nearly last three years the senior staff takes turns driving east to the nearest substantial town, Aphrodite, in one of our three cargo vans to do the weekly shopping. Sam’s and Well’s are easy pickups, since our chef can do our ordering online a day or two before hand and everything can be pulled by their staff for us and is all ready to go by the time we arrive. Wal-Mart is just for all of rest of the incidentals, soap, shampoo, feminine hygiene products, the new Xbox console games, the latest released movie DVD’s, and in Claire’s case, six different shades of pink nail polish. Our only other real essential, beer, came in kegs from Wells, not to mention the odd case or three from Wally-world.

It’s our weakest security link, having our senior staff driving back and forth alone in the desert every week but we’d had no problems before in nearly three years, until now ... a pleasantly surprising fact that had defied even my most optimistic expectations. Personally, I’d wagered that someone ought to have noticed us at least a year ago. Corporate’s own private estimate was similar, expecting us to remain below the radar of our competitors for no more than two years. Tops.

Besides, you just can’t lock people up indefinitely inside of a mine. They get a tad irritable after awhile. A day-trip into town for everyone at least once a month released the pressures and felt more like a vacation day rather than the fairly tedious chore that handling our shopping could have been.

Well, we’d managed to avoid trouble for nearly three years, until now. Production had already exceeded all long-term planned estimates and if we needed to pack up shop next month, or next week or even tomorrow, so be it.

So, once again we now had another vehicle following us back to the mine ... which had now occurred for three straight Saturday’s in a row. Sure, this wasn’t quite a concern for an immediate security threat, yet ... but a modicum of caution was certainly in order and this did at last confirm a few of my concerns. That’s why I was with Claire on this trip. Since the second tailing event last Saturday I’d decreed that no one (even me) should go into town alone. According to the rotation list, this week would have been Claire’s turn to go alone and do our shopping. The idea that petite Claire, who was all of five foot-nothing in height, needed a bodyguard was frankly laughable though. In her graduate school days she had been a gym rat and earned a fifth-degree black belt! There wasn’t a guy at the mine she couldn’t have taken-out fast in a fair (or unfair) fight, but rules are rules. No one, not even me, was going to step foot outside alone from now on, except for a damned good reason.

“I see it,” I muttered, with my eyes more on the distinct camel toe outline of her vaginal lips straining against the damp pink (and mostly sheer) fabric of her panties than actually upon the view in the rear view mirror. “They’ve been following us since town, so it’s not some coincidence or probably a local rancher, but I’m going to pull into Dairy King just up ahead to see if I can get a better discrete look. See if you can take pic of their plate on your cell, if they drive past but make it look like a selfie though ... be discrete.” Discretion and subtlety were not Claire’s strong suits.

“Sure thing,’ Claire stretched herself back up into the car seat, dropping her legs and wet toenails down to the floor board mat and with a deep sigh of feigned frustration she rummaged in her oversized pink purse for her cell phone, which was also bright pink with rhinestones. Dairy King was just about the last point west that received a reliably strong cell signal anyway, so she could check her personal messages again for the last time, or at least appear to be doing so if or when our tail drove past us, watching.

Dairy King on a Saturday afternoon was always crowded, with a nearly full parking lot and a long waiting line for a booth. It was the nearest restaurant for most of the counties ranchers, from west of Aphrodite until the New Mexico border, and even the drive-through was packed with waiting trucks and cars with local families stopping for a Saturday treat out. This wasn’t an unusual stop for us, and more often than not we’d make this a last stop on the way home to pick up a jumbo-sized take-out order of burgers and fries for everyone back at the mine. The order called in significantly in advance, of course. Right now, it would be an hour wait to get anything, even an ice cream cone, but I pulled into their parking lot anyway, parking the van near the entrance parallel with the road so that Claire could get a clear photo if our tail drove past us.

I got out and made a show of walking inside the restaurant to check the waiting time for a quick take-out and confirmed that the situation for getting a swift order in was hopeless. I then mentally counted to twenty and then turned around and left, just in time to watch the white SUV, a Chevy Suburban, pull into the parking lot behind us and keep going around to the back of the restaurant, to apparently join the queue waiting at the drive-through. I wasn’t fooled.

“Did you get it?” I asked Claire through the window of the passenger side of the van.

“Sure ... which one do you prefer? Surrender the Pink?” She inquired, dangling her right foot outside the open window for me to inspect her pink painted toes, “Or this one, Cuff Me and Stuff Me?” The left foot then joined it’s other outside the window so that I could contrast the two virtually identical shades of glittering wet pinkness.

The view was nice, I had to admit, and not just the cute delicate toes that were registered as martial arts lethal weapons. Her pink sundress was hiked back up around her hips once again with her crotch once again fully on display ... now without the minor coverage of the pink thong, which she was twirling around playfully in a circle with the fingers of her left hand. I hadn’t realized that she had both a clit hood barbell piercing and a ring through the large clitoris head itself. That had to have hurt, but I bet that the ring made her extra hyper-sensitive now! The cunt lips were bare and moist and just partially separated like a delicate flower. She’d been rubbing herself while I was inside and was clearly aroused. If this fact wasn’t blatantly obvious enough, she then smiled and licked her index finger before slowly gliding it across her clit before gently penetrating it just inside of lips to spread her labia wider to reveal the glistening wetness within.

I decided that I needed to remain strong and focused ... and obviously idiotically stupid too as well. I shut my eyes from the glorious vision before me and walked around to the driver’s side and got back into the van. I tried to concentrate on other things, like getting us home safely ... and not getting a piece of the friendliest girl at the mine to complete her full amorous collection of sexual partners!

Damn, I was going to regret this ... all of the way home!

The white SUV did reappear a few minutes later after we left the restaurant and it resumed following us again, but from a bit of a further discrete distance this time. Claire had managed a quick snap of the rear plate as it had passed behind her and while it wasn’t taken from a good angle, the hastily taken image appeared to show some mostly legible plate numbers. Our tail kept its distance for the remainder of our trip home and by the time we turned off of the paved county road onto our dirt ranch road for the last five miles to our security gate leading to the mine they were out of sight entirely, if not out of my mind.

Claire wasn’t speaking to me. Annoyed beyond words that her sexual advances had been spurned yet again, she’d spent the remainder of the homeward trip in silence, not even bothering to sing along to the mix CD anymore. By the time we were indeed about 53 Miles West of Venus, we were both rather overjoyed at being home!

“Security,” the rather bored sounding female voice over the intercom stated after I’d driven up to the security gate and pressed the large red ‘Announce’ button. There were two metal signs of note hung upon the gate, the older and larger one stating that the property belonged to Littlejohn Geo-Exploration, Ltd. It was well-weathered and rusted through and only just barely suspended from the fence by several bits of wire. The next good West Texas windstorm might just rip it off entirely. A smaller newer metal sign beneath it stated that the premises were now operated by Poravuvu Silk, Ltd ... and that was us, the relatively new operators. There was an electronic access card reader next to the intercom, but it was for show only. If you hacked the reader, you could trigger open the electronic gate ... and it would set off a series of alarms in Security. Normal access was strictly remote, handled from the security tower. No exceptions.

“It’s been a long and winding road, but the sun is up, the sky is blue, it’s beautiful and so are you ... dear Prudence!”

“Dave, you always say the sweetest things! Opening the gate ... just a sec!” About three seconds later the gate opened and after crossing the ubiquitous West Texas cattle-guard crossing we drove just a bit down the dirt road and waited for the gate to secure behind us before continuing up the unpaved track on a gradual rise up to the crater rim and then down the gentle slope to the crater floor below. I stopped at the railroad track crossing out of habit but our rail pickups or deliveries were infrequent and invariably at night, so as usual nothing was visible up or down the line.

I parked at the usual spot right in front of Operations and I didn’t even have the back door of the van open before one of our guards had opened up the downstairs sliding security doors to allow us to start wheeling in the groceries on a hand-cart. By us, I of course meant Claire. It was her week to do the shopping and despite the fact that I’d done all of the driving, and most of getting all of the stuff from the stores too, it was only fair to allow her to port the goodies inside to the kitchen area, which took up about half of the downstairs Operations area. She was now even more pissed off, and let me know it, but fair was fair. Besides, I really needed to have a long confab with Security upstairs right away.

I left the van keys with Claire and walked into Operations and paused only long enough there to stick my head into my corner office to check the top of my desk to make sure that nothing critical had landed there and to check that Onan was doing alright. Onan was my pet parrot, a Poravuvu Green that corporate had sent me as something of an unfunny birthday joke a few years ago. I kept him in my office in a large cage that filled up a full quarter of the room. The bird was loud and thoroughly obnoxious, and clearly had received significant professional speech instruction from a flotilla of crusty sailors, stevedores and longshoremen. Then for finishing school, the foul-mouthed fowl had also apparently spent significant time in a brothel. Like his biblical namesake, Onan was a messy bird and was always spilling his seed upon the ground. I topped off his food and water and ignored his mimicked graphic recitation of the whorehouse proffered services and the rates that would be charged. Onan’s facts appeared a bit dated ... no one charged just ten dollars anymore for a simple blowjob.

My desk was still clear and my crude roommate could be safely ignored until tomorrow. Weekends were usually quiet around here and everyone liked it that way. Most of the hourly staff was off work and doing stuff with their families in the residential housing area or just tossing back a dozen or so cold ones. After spending a day with Claire, I was feeling the urge to get good and squiffy later on too and toss back a few beers myself!

Security was upstairs, reachable by either a lengthy clockwise cubical metal staircase or a small passenger elevator next to the large freight elevator that descended down into the first level of the mine. I chose the staircase today. I’d been sitting on my ass in the van since this morning and I wanted to get my blood pumping so that I could think and get my thoughts a bit better in order. It took a few minutes to make the climb and then I had to smile through the mirrored security glass of an extremely secure door and wait to be buzzed in.

Corporate takes security here very, very seriously. So do I ... and fortunately so does our Security Chief Phylicity. She’d been the one who had answered the gate intercom a few minutes ago and she’d already gathered all of her staff for a full security meeting, including our four hourly guard contractors and her two salaried deputies. The room was noticeably full of tension and everyone was noticeably anxious. Bad news travels fast, especially here in the back ass end of nowhere.

“You were followed again,” Phylicity stated. It wasn’t a question. We have an oral security code for the front gate, not to mention at least a dozen hidden cameras that watch our gate, the ranch road, the rail line, the turnoff from the local county road and all obviously vulnerable sections of barbed wire fencing along the way. Not including the three or four dozen cameras that watch over everything inside our fence. If things were normal, which they had been until recently, I’d quote some random meaningless song lyric. Maybe Dylan, or perhaps Beach Boys or Joni Mitchell or just whatever song earworm was in my head at the moment. If there was some vague minor trouble, like a strange car obviously following us, then we were to quote Beatles – that was a Code Yellow situation. Worse or more obviously threatening potential external danger was a Code Orange warning, requiring a quote from the Rolling Stones. Imminent and immediately direct danger, Code Red meant Led Zeppelin. Corporate had similar but different codes of their own with various meanings, but these were our local ones. Since I had double quoted the Beatles, this suggested that I was nudging up the already preexisting Code Yellow alert a bit to the edge, but not quite to Code Orange status.