Love Machine Read online

  LOVE MACHINE

  The Dipole Series

  By

  Chris Lowry

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Grand Ozarks Media

  Copyright @2016 by Chris Lowry

  All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976 the scanning, uploading and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from this book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  Grand Ozarks Media

  Little Rock AR 72202

  www.Chrislowrywrites.wordpress.com

  The Grand Ozarks Speakers Bureau provides a wide range of authors for speaking events. To find out more, visit our website.

  Printed in the United States of America

  ATTENTION CORPORATIONS AND ORGANIZATIONS

  Most Grand Ozarks Books are available at quantity discounts with bulk purchase for educational, business or sales promotional use. For information, please call or write:

  Special Marketing Department, Grand Ozarks Media

  Little Rock AR 72202

  Telephone: 1-501-436-1164

  Can I send you a FREE COPY of a sci fi comedy, SUPER SECRET SPACE MISSION?

  LOVE MACHINE

  CHAPTER ONE

  The NC 17 was moored in the D section of the halfway space station between Mars and Earth. Tinker stood at the triple paned window that offered a view of the vast expanse of space and his pride and joy floating against the inky backdrop.

  “Darling,” he whispered against the reinforced plastic that separated him from the vacuum. “You make my dangly bits tingle.”

  “Excuse me?” a rough voice interrupted his reverie.

  Tinker turned and saw a couple behind him. The man was six inches taller than he was and outweighed him by a hundred pounds, but only in his shoulders and massive slabs of meat that most people called arms.

  He showed them off in a hideous orange tank top tucked into the narrow waist of pants that ballooned around his legs.

  The woman next to him wasn’t wearing much else. Tink had seen hookers in the brothels he liked to frequent with heavier gauge gauze covering their nether regions than she was wearing.

  It left little to the imagination, which was how the pilot normally liked to see women.

  Except when their steroidal boyfriends glared at him like this one was.

  “Scuse me, mate,” he flashed a charming smile. “I wasn’t talking to your lady.”

  The modified giant glanced up and down the steel corridor.

  “There ain’t no one else here.”

  Tinker looked first one way. Then the other. They were both empty. He did it again, just to be sure.

  “Yeah, you’re right,” he said. “There’s just you and me and her.”

  “Then you had to be talking to her.”

  Tinker shook his head.

  “Nope. I can see how you would think that though-”

  “Then you were talking to me? Do I make your dangle tingle?”

  “Bits,” Tinker corrected. “Dangly bits, and no. No you don’t.”

  “What’s the matter with me?” the guy sneered. “You think I’m ugly or something?”

  Tinker gulped.

  He did think the guy was ugly, but he was pretty sure that if he said so, it would be taken personally, and probably violently.

  He didn’t want things to get violent.

  He just wanted a drink. And maybe a camera to capture the vision of the striking woman standing in the corridor.

  He tried not to stare.

  Failed.

  “I was talking about my ship,” he pointed over his shoulder.

  “That ain’t your ship,” the giant grumbled.

  Tinker nodded, his eyes locked on something shiny in the navel of the woman. She had a trail of glittering gems that led all the way from her belly button down to-

  “Of course it’s my ship, mate.”

  “They why is it leaving?”

  Tinker blinked and turned.

  The tether to the NS 17 floated free from the docking berth. Ports on the back of the ship blasted frigid geysers of air into space to turn the ship away from the space station.

  He beat against the plastic glass.

  “Hey!” he shouted. “That’s my ship!”

  The rear rockets began to glow as soon as the NC 17 was clear of the station.

  “No!” Tinker screamed.

  But he could do nothing as the rockets engaged and the ship, his ship took off, racing away.

  A heavy hand fell on his shoulder and ripped him around off the glass.

  “How are your bits now?” the giant asked.

  He didn’t wait for an answer and instead punched him into the sweet oblivion of a blackout.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Tinker woke with a monster hangover. His head pounded, his tongue felt like sandpaper, and the cargo hold of his ship smelled like putrid discharge.

  He cracked open one aching eye and groaned. His jaw hurt, his face hurt and there was something he needed to remember, but he couldn’t.

  The memory of it tickled the edge of his awareness. It was important, that much he could recall.

  He glanced down at his naked crotch and legs below his wrinkled shirt. He snaked a hand down to double check for missing parts and let out a sigh of relief when he counted all the parts.

  Everything was where it was supposed to be.

  “Morning lover,” a voice purred next to him.

  Tinker angled his head to the far side of the bed and blinked the cracked open eye through a series of winks, working to bring the face in focus.

  She was gorgeous. Long red hair piled on top of an angelic face, pouty lips and green eyes that he was pretty sure were contacts, because emerald wasn’t a naturally occurring color, was it?

  He blinked some more and she leaned over and kissed him on the cheek.

  “Morning?” he croaked.

  “You were amazing last night,” she said as she rolled off the bed and draped a silk robe across her firm backside.

  He got just enough of a glimpse to make the blood in his nether regions start boiling before she turned back to him, all the good bits hidden in clothes now.

  He looked up.

  But her face though, a face made for men to go to war, for poets to compose sonnets, a face made to cry out in pleasure just for him.

  He felt the stirring stir again.

  “Look who else is up,” she giggled. “That’s going to cost extra.”

  He yawned, stretched and shrugged all at once, hoping that it didn’t look as awkward as it felt and sending up a silent prayer that the combined muscle contractions didn’t loosen his sphincter to squeeze out some gas.

  “You have to pay last night’s bill first lover,” she purred.

  He tried to speak, but his mouth was dry and felt stuffed full of cotton. He ran a sandpaper coated tongue around the desert in his cheeks and across his teeth, working up enough moisture to make speech possible.

  “Pay?” he finally managed.

  Her green eyes took on a hard look that flashed across her doll like features and then disappeared just as quick.

  She reached behind her and pressed a communicator button on the wall.

  “You do have credit?” she asked.

  The smile was gone, the face an impassive wall of frozen indifference.


  “Credit?” he tried to sit up and failed.

  He worked at it for several moments, working to clear the fog from his clouded mind and get the muscles in his stomach to listen.

  There was a lot of grunting, a few moans and finally a victory cry as he managed to roll over onto his stomach and use his arms to leverage up into a seated position.

  The door whisked open and a woman glared down at him. At least he thought it was a woman. She had qualities attributable to womanhood at least.

  A pile of blue gray hair was mashed into a crooked bee hive on her wrinkled face. She wore granny glasses perched on the end of her nose, half moon spectacles that made her look older, angry and imperious at the same time.

  She was taller than Tinker, filling the door with broad shoulders that had to be huge because of her massive arms. Her forearms were bigger than his thighs.

  Pendulous breasts swayed under a long kimono like they had minds of their own, each moving in different directions as she settled in the doorframe and crossed her massive arms over her chest and glared at him some more.

  “Twice costs extra,” she said in a voice rough from whiskey, or screaming.

  “Twice what?”

  “Two rides,” she lifted a fist and showed him two fingers. “Last night and this morning.”

  Tinker shifted toward the edge of the bed.

  “I didn’t do anything this morning,” he groaned. “Tell her.”

  The room took a little twist and spin as he moved again, and he held a hand to his head to try and make it stop.

  “Twice,” the woman growled. “I heard you.”

  She tilted her head toward the green eyed girl.

  “If you made squeals like that for your other clients, you’d double your income.”

  “You have this all wrong,” said Tinker.

  He finally got his head to go still and stood on shaky legs.

  The woman stepped into the small room and pressed a thick finger against his chest.

  “I don’t normally take a man on his word,” she said in her low voice. “But you were very convincing last night. I thought about coming out of retirement, just for you.”

  He shivered.

  “Buddy, you ain’t getting out of here without paying.”

  Her finger pressed harder against his chest and sent him back to the bed.

  Tinker looked around for help, but the hooker in the corner studied her nails with a bored look on her face.

  “Look lady,” he tried to stand up again, but the bulldozer disguised as a woman planted herself in front of him and pushed him back on the bed again.

  “Lady,” he tried again. “I don’t remember coming here last night. I don’t remember anything. Except-”

  He sat up again, but that must have been against the rules because the madam forced him back down and straddled him.

  “My ship!” he grunted.

  “What ship?”

  “My new ship,” he gasped as if that was explanation enough.

  “If you can afford a new ship,” the madam leaned over him. “You can afford to pay the bill.”

  Tinker squirmed but it was no use.

  The weight of the woman, her heavy hips squashing him into the firm mattress as she pressed harder and harder.

  Things that had been stirring earlier began to make a hasty retreat into his torso in an effort to put distance between themselves and whatever was going on under the kimono.

  “Someone stole it,” he managed to gasp as she shoved harder.

  “Stole what?” the madam breathed on him. Her breath smelled like candy lemon drops and alcohol.

  “Ship.”

  “Someone stole your ship?”

  He nodded.

  “And you came straight here and ran up a tab? That doesn’t seem too smart.”

  Tinker tried to shake his head, but her massive hands grabbed him by the skull and held him still.

  “Are you trying to rob me?”

  He tried again, but this time, his head wouldn’t move at all.

  “No,” he moaned.

  “Did you think you could take advantage of my good nature?”

  Her cracked lips were inches from his. Her wrinkled visage was the most terrifying thing he had seen in his life.

  “Do you know what happens to men who try to screw me over?”

  Her cable cord strong thighs clenched against him. He felt the bones in his pelvis shift and crack.

  “You screw them back?” he sobbed.

  He was pretty sure his bits had disappeared altogether. Not that it mattered. If the madam kept squeezing him, things would pop and crush and mash up into a paste that would splurt out of his mouth and onto the hooker’s bed.

  Instead, the madam threw back her head and barked a laugh into the wall.

  “You would be so lucky,” she gave him another squeeze and slid off to sit beside him.

  One of her hands grabbed him by the collar of the shirt he was still wearing and yanked him up beside her.

  “Put your pants back on,” she told him. “You’re going to work off what you owe me.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Tinker tried to think of one good thing about the job at hand, but cleaning up after a bunch of johns was no picnic.

  He made himself laugh at his own joke. There were a ton of jobs going on behind the closed doors in the space station brothel, just not the kind of work he was interested in.

  Unless it was on the receiving end of one of those jobs, he corrected. Pomfrey the madam of the establishment had dictated a low wage that would allow him to pay off the debt in just two short days, and when Tinker tried to protest, she suggested he could work it off in other ways with a wiggle of her bushy painted brows.

  He considered it, the gods help him.

  It would be a few moments of torture that would get him on to his real hunt faster, but try as he might, he just couldn’t picture it happening.

  Technically, he when he pictured it happening, it made him sick, and his first job was cleaning up his own spew.

  Then it was on to other various discharges that didn’t belong to him.

  He collected crusty rags for cleaning. He collected crusty and sticky instruments for sterilization. At one point, he collected something he had no idea about, not its use, nor its origin or the reason for its shape. Not even why it felt the way it felt, which was a cross between sticky and gritty, like ground glass against his skin.

  He washed, and wiped and lubed and stacked.

  The brothel was set up like others he had visited. Every space station had them. Space colonization and expanding the planets was the work of scientists and astronauts, at least the initial forays.

  But settling in space, growing the population had occurred much like the frontier of the old west.

  First there were miners and prospectors, working the asteroid belt and Mars. Then came those who supplied them, and the first of these were bars and whores.

  Men who worked in space mines had little else to do with their money than get drunk and get laid, and the space stations themselves were no different.

  Booze and brothels popped up like flowers in an earth meadow after a spring rain. Technology advanced, but the needs of man didn’t, Tinker thought.

  Except Tech did a pretty good job of keeping up.

  Sexbots were a craze for a while, and a fetish for a few stations. Now they were just one more flavor in a spectrum of tastes.

  “I’m glad there are no bots,” he said to himself.

  “Were you talking to me?”

  Tinker looked over his shoulder.

  A man in a sleek business suit was on the arm of the red headed hooker he had woke up with this morning. The man had bushy sideburns that stretched to the bottom of his cheeks, ruddy red chubby things that turned his piggish eyes into tiny squints of obsidian.

  “Just thinking out loud, friend,” Tinker hefted the bucket of after rags and started toward the laundry pod attached to the brothel.
<
br />   “I’m not your friend,” the man called after him.

  “Your loss asshole,” Tinker said, again to himself.