53 Miles West of Venus Ch. 02

Now that was the way to butter the old rancher up! He was raised to be a law and order man from birth and the idea of anyone 'getting away with it', especially probable rustlers, really irked him right to his marrow. At the moment we still had time and we weren't without resources... and more than ever we needed to get a handle on the identity of our probable enemy.

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I had Dwayne call downstairs for Phyl and the two of us drove right over to the Collins ranch house, which was about five minutes further up the road. Waylon was already right there at the cattle guard by his second inner security gate to greet us when we pulled up. He took us straight to the intruder's van parked in his barn and the three of us wasted a pretty good chunk of an otherwise pleasantly nice Sunday afternoon pretty much stripping out the interior down to the factory frame... and finding nothing for our efforts. Right from the start, we could tell that the van was a rental from a discount 'Rent-a-Wreck Cheap' rental car agency in El Paso. Strictly a mom & pop sort of agency that probably didn't even get a credit card number or copy of the renter's driver's license. Strictly cash on (or under) the table sort of deal. Traceable in theory... but in practice the agency couldn't or wouldn't be able tell us a thing worth knowing. The tags were stolen, but the VIN number was still present on the dash, so we logged it. Corporate security had the time, money and manpower to trace that and could confirm that it did belong to the rental agency... and that was about all.

Sigh. No handy and very convenient matchbooks with their boss's name written and then lost under the floor mats either. Just a few Coke cans and burger wrappers. The vehicle was clean... Really, really clean, especially for an older clunker bargain rental.

It was all for naught, but we made the effort anyway.

I had Phyl pull up just short of our security gate on the way back and we commiserated and plotted in private for the better part of the next half hour. The events of early this morning and the utter lack of trace evidence in the abandoned van just made our noses itch. We were certain that our unseen enemies were good... and also were decidedly rich and powerful with the resources to take any action against us that they deemed most likely to be profitable. This was crazy disturbing and scary... enough so that Phyl was ready to recommend us going to Orange status right away, but very reluctantly I was against it... at least for right this minute.

"Phyl, take the van and get your ass into Aphrodite now. Got your gun? Good... with luck and a heavy foot on the gas pedal you can be at the Sheriff's office by around three o'clock and maybe even catch Granger still manning the day shift desk. Talk to anyone that will talk to you and buy friends and strangers all the drinks you need on the company credit card until someone says something of interest. Then find your jerk of a fuck-buddy and squeeze him for all of the sweet pretty pillow talk that you can get out of him... along with that Sam's or Wal-Mart parking lot security tape footage. And also check the county airport and see what you can find out about that private plane that flew in this morning and where the fuck it came from! Probably the FAA registered flight plans are bogus too, but check it out anyway. Stay in town until you can find out something... anything! Can do? I'll hold off on the Monday morning staff meeting until you get back... hopefully with some sort of answers."

"Can do! Off to go burn some rubber... and some corporate plastic!" I got out of the van and thumped the metal of the side passenger door for good luck and Phyl speed off, spraying gravel behind her all of the way down the ranch road to the county road. Dwayne told me later that she was already doing seventy when she took the corner nearly on two wheels turning onto the paved highway and then she floored the accelerator pedal down to the metal and probably was doing a hundred miles an hour by the time she passed our last camera heading towards town. I wished her luck.

It was a three mile walk up the mine road to the crater and down to Operations but I didn't head straight there. The two internal intruders this morning hadn't been caught completely flat footed before being arrested by the deputy, and probably had ditched the more incriminating equipment and their guns in the brush near the fence. It was going to take awhile to really carefully search the entire area near where the van had been parked and I did have some partial success. I found the .22 caliber hunting rifle easily enough, having just been tossed away into the brush, along with a pair of Glock pistols, but like the other weapons that had been found in the van there were no visible serial numbers. A pair of pretty high-quality communication headsets were found next and I was more hopeful that corporate security could do something useful with these. These were expensive units, but something that very top private security companies could afford to use. If nothing else, this might give us the encrypted communications frequencies that they used last night... and might use again in the future.

Finding the tablet computer took longer. They'd buried it under the sand and I wouldn't have found it at all except that a fragment of broken display glass caught my eye in the late afternoon sun. They'd smashed the unit repeatedly against a rock and then buried it. It was a total mess, and also quite incomplete. I didn't see a communications SIMM card or even any computer memory for the unit. Probably they buried those critical pieces somewhere else before being caught. I tried to follow their tracks but already the ever-present west Texas wind had done a decent job of covering them up and I didn't find squat. I'd send one of our security guards out here tomorrow morning with a metal detector but even that wasn't an optimistic hope of finding anything useable. I never found their sat-phone at all, which was a major disappointment.

At about half an hour before dark I called it quits and hurried back to Operations. Stumbling up and down our somewhat gentle sloped crater rim in the dark was still something of a dangerous thing to do and it would be easy to trip or fall on the rocks and wreck an ankle or a knee in the gloom. I kept to the road, which took a bit longer, but was undoubtedly the wiser decision.

Sunday dinner at the mine was always something of a feast but I was largely too preoccupied to enjoy it. My waistline was already enlarged enough as it was. Instead I pounded out a rather lengthy update for corporate security and sent it out. All of our data and communications goes out from Operations via satellite dishes on the roof, and seriously encrypted. No land lines, microwave towers or fiber. Getting a cell phone signal from the roof is nearly impossible, with reception from the nearest tower in Aphrodite being just one-bar strength at best. SMS text messages have a slightly better chance of transmitting if you stand up on a ladder on the very northwest edge of the roof, leaning somewhat unsafely into the open air waving your cell phone about at random until it connects, for just a nano-second or two.

I wasn't expecting an immediate response back, but I spent the night fitfully sleeping on a cot upstairs in Security just in case. More likely, I had been hoping to get some sort of message from Phyl, but she didn't call during the night, nor did we hear from her at all the next morning. I kept telling myself not to worry, that I'd given her a rather open-end assignment. She'd do the job I gave her and not worry about arbitrary guidelines. Still I was pacing worse than a caged tiger in a cage and yelling insults right back at Onan the perverted parrot when she arrived back at the mine just before two o'clock that Monday afternoon.

Phyl wasn't even remotely in good humor and more or less glared at me when she glanced into my office to report her arrival back from town.

"I'm going to call the executive staff meeting for three o'clock. Will that work for you?"

"Yeah... give me time to shit, shower and shave and down a drink or two first. Will the meeting be open bar?"

"Can be... would that help?"

"It would for me anyway... not so sure about for you, after I've reported in. Want to hear the low-lights now, first? To save time... get ready to go Orange. Corporate might even make us go Red, once they read my report. No peace for the wretched... we might be fucked, and not in a pleasant and delightful way either."

Phyl was serious. Her face was plain and expressionless, except for the obvious exhaustion that she clearly felt. Not good... not that Phyl ever exaggerated anything anyway.

"Yes, but take your shower and grab a sandwich first. That way you just have to tell it once and not repeat yourself. I was going to take the Orange Op Plan binder with me to the meeting anyway. We're ready anyway... more or less."

"See you there."

Phyl shuffled off downstairs to the security quarters and a very, very long shower. Since I was caught up on all of my managerial paperwork (98% crap make-work) and very bored with arguing with my pet bird, I went over to the kitchen and checked out the likelihood of getting a tray of sandwiches for our meeting. Our ornery contract chef was actually knee deep with prep for dinner after a brief query I decided that I didn't like the way his eyes were glaring at me while holding a large razor sharp chef's knife, so I made them myself and put them on a tray and set it inside the walk-in cooler to stay chilled. Then I checked that the small bar that we kept upstairs on the roof was at least nominally stocked with a partial bottle at least of everyone's usual, then tossed a few six packs into an ice chest. Bad news or not, I was more in the mood for beer and unless the news was especially horrific it was really too early in the day still to start getting squiffy, or even down-right hammered.

After making two trips up and down from the kitchen to the roof to restock ice, I figured that I'd given Phyl more than enough time to shower and change so I walked down the security staircase to the basement to check on her, but I was quite wrong. She was still in the shower and I shouted out to her that I was there in the central security common room and sat down to wait upon her. It took about another ten minutes or so, but finally I could hear the water being shut off and the sound of wet feet padding about.

With the bathroom facilities being shared by pretty much everyone in the facility, excepting for those folks that used the smaller private ones in their outside residences, there was only a very minimal amount of personal privacy available, assuming that one had either a large enough towel or even a bathrobe. Phyl had taken neither with her and hadn't particularly cared enough to even grab or use any of the common towels either. Instead, quite unconcerned about a potential audience for her floor show, she paraded out from the bathroom into the common room with nothing but a hand towel wrapped around her hair.

The view was rather impressive. Phyl's café au lait toned light black bare skin was wet all over, barely even nominally dried and in the relatively low fluorescent light from the ceiling it gave her skin even more of a glowing shine than usual. You couldn't miss her breasts; they were bare and proudly exposed without a hint of embarrassment. They were nice and well-proportioned, being about small to medium sized, with only a hint of sag. Nice very defined dark nipples too. Her build was athletic with a mostly flat stomach and an extremely toned and firm butt. Her hips were generous but a reasonably proper diet and appalling amounts of exercise kept them in shape. Running those stairs endlessly up and down had certain kept any hints of aging and gravity away! Phyl was nearly thirty-five, but she still had the body of an athletic twenty-something. I tried not to look directly at her bare pubic mound for more than an instant, but it was a memory that I would long remember and appreciate. Undoubtedly late at night all alone in my bed with my cock in my hand.

Unfortunately, the very fine view was not being presented for my visual delight and edification. She was merely too tired, too angry, too pissed and too annoyed to care.

"Come back into my room and we'll talk while I change. Better change the meeting time though, back at least another hour or so... I've been thinking while I was soaking my head and I'm not sure I can give you even the brief executive overview in just twenty minutes. We'll need to discuss it all too, before the other's get involved... not but what they won't bob their heads anyway and agree with whatever we decide."

"Sure... let's just make it five o'clock then. I've made a tray of sandwiches already so we can all just have dinner up there, talk and watch the sunset."

"More like drink dinner, at least for me. I don't know yet whether I want to just laugh or cry." Phyl bent over to grab a bottle from the lower shelf of her bedside nightstand giving me another nice business view of her ass and full, wet bare vaginal lips. She then took two short swigs from the bottle followed by a last longer one, after which she sneezed loudly and began the slow task of putting on some clothes. Phyl's usual clothing tastes tended towards casual, but this afternoon she was unusually informal, especially for a staff meeting. She first pulled on a tank top that didn't do much to minimize the view of the still wet breasts and then after rummaging in a dresser slid on an old well-worn jean skirt that came to about mid-thigh.

"Claire would enjoy the view." I joked as Phyl's tits jiggled about a bit under her wet tank top as she made a token effort at drying her hair.

"The slut would! Good thing though that she won't be there! Anyway, fuck the bra and panties, at least for tonight! It's just going to be Peggy and Brice there anyway... and you, of course. Besides, you've already had a better view of my stuff today, not but what I'll bet you'll have a raging hard-on the whole meeting just from looking at my pokies!" She laughed. She was probably right.

Peggy was the Senior Project Scientist, responsible for everyone and everything underground and my #2 in charge of things if I wasn't there. Brice was her upstairs counter-part, a professional mining facilities engineer and manager on semi-permanent loan to us from Littlejohn Geo-Exploration that was responsible for all of the remaining surface mining equipment, buildings and structures, and any other assorted hardware left remaining and slowly rusting away here in the crater above ground. Both were older, Peggy in her early fifties and Brice was at least a full decade older than that. Both were also shameless pervs in their own right. Something about this place just seems to attract them!

Peggy's specialty was hydrochemistry and had originally come here at the start of the project with her then husband Bob who was our geophysicist. As our largely underground community began to take an increasingly sexually liberated attitude towards casual recreational sex, the couple began to 'swing' with others. It was originally entirely her husband's idea, but it was Peggy who really embraced it, enough so that they had a falling out over jealousy issues and he left the mine after about a year but she remained. I still miss him as he was our only geologist... a handy thing to have when working in a mine! Technically, they're still just legally separated. She claimed that when the project finished up here that she is going to retire to a swinger's 'retirement' resort in either Florida or Mexico (with or without her absent husband) and pretty much fuck herself to death.

Brice on the other hand was just old, rather creepy and more than just a little pervy. Our resident IT geek told me once that he has lots of nasty pictures and videos of girls on his private computer young enough to be his granddaughter, assuming he had one. Probably too young, if you catch my hint. Anyway, he was easy enough to avoid as he almost never went below Level One of the mine. Gossip has it that Claire screwed him once, not long after she arrived and that he had her dress up in a short schoolgirl's uniform, complete with pigtails. To make the story even creepier, he then allegedly told her that she was to call him 'daddy' while she gave him a blowjob and while they fucked. Who knows if that story is really true, but even slutty Claire now avoids Brice like the plague. Brice is also our only real on-site repairman for anything and everything mechanical, but he has access to a small on-call maintenance staff back at Littlejohn corporate in Arizona that visit as needed. If the shit was indeed about to hit the fan, he'd need to know all about it to make his own preparations, and to keep our corporate partner Littlejohn directly informed as well.

I was ready to go on upstairs to the roof, to just sit and have a drink or two upstairs under the shade of the big beach umbrella, and out of the late spring late afternoon sun, but Phyl just remained seated on her bed. She quietly began to tell me about her investigations yesterday, taking a small sip from her bedside bottle every few minutes. Her voice sounded a bit tight, and quite restrained, as if she was in a struggle with her emotions. I thought she might come to tears once, but she kept control over herself and as we talked she seemed to relax. It didn't last long though before I was joining her in sharing nips from the bottle and we'd made a nice start on a fresh new one just before we were ready to go up to the roof and deal with the others.

We ought to have been nicely squiffy or at least wobbling a bit as we took the stairs, but we were both dead sober, and that wasn't the least bit comforting! Then I had to go all the way back downstairs to the kitchen to retrieve the sandwiches and back up to the roof again. The extra few minutes of exercise helped to take the edge off of my growing stress and allowed me to sort of get my thoughts into order before the meeting. I'd need them!