Gene Drifters: The Clone Soldier Chronicles-Book III (9 page)

“I don’t believe that’s the issue. Have you checked the
reverse vids, Roxanne?” Rose pointed to the screen with her left paw, while
leaning her head slightly out her side slot. She wanted to see if she could
visually check the back of the rig, just in case the reverse vids were indeed crapped
up.

“I have a visual on the problem. We have a visitor. He’s
suctioned to our rig back fender. I’m not sure how long he’s been there. I hope
he’s just hitching transport.” Rose, put her head back into the cab and shut
the slot. Roxanne coded in the highest level safety, in case the hitcher tried
to gain entry to the control cab.

“Well, I don’t mind, as long as he doesn’t try to gain entry
to the control cabin. You know we’ve seen that more lately, more hitchers, as
the nitro-chit costs increase. Maybe he’s just a solo-walk-about. This time of
year you see them a lot, when University is out; solos hitching illegal rides
to either coast. Should I vocal-vid him, ask him what he’s doing sucking a
ride?” Roxanne got ready to open the com-bot to the back of her rig.

“Okay, but don’t execute a quick turn or any other
maneuvers. We wouldn’t want to squash some poor University student out on his
or her vacation.” Rose knew that Roxanne could be careless with life when her
rig was endangered.

“Hey you, you need to ID or I’ll have to com the Inc. You
could be in big deep if you don’t have a valid tunnel ID code.” Roxanne spoke
into her com, which would broadcast to the back of the rig in 47 languages. The
vids showed a big guy, but he was wearing a security suit and a helmet, so she
could not identify her hitcher.

“It’s me, Roxanne. It’s Joster. Please open the top. I got
real serious news. Here, I’ll slam some DNA onto the ID box so you can verify.
Hurry up before the tunnel patrol detects me.”

Joster slammed his hand against the rig butt ID box, and his
genetic sample sucked through a vacuum tube to the insta-sequencer behind the
security dispatch box. The procedure took only two minutes, and the com voice then
announced a 97.4562% probability of a positive for one Joster McClain, a
27-year-old librarian from the Tokyo WME Regional University Trewitt Memorial
Library. It was named for General Trewitt, the bastard who’d spread the initial
bioengineered flu virus, igniting a pandemic, offing 58% of the world’s
population ( it was higher in Asia), and ensuring the entrenchment of world
domination by the World Monetary Enterprise, the WME.

“Joster, what the hell are you doing plastered to the back
of my rig. You could have just chimed me on my bot-com. Isn’t this rather
melodramatic?” Roxanne opened the hatch and coded in back cab safe entry for
Joster. If she had not, he would be vaporized by the rig’s entry safety device.

“What do you mean, “bot-com,” you know you can’t be reached
when you’re hauling in the tunnel. Do you have some special com device or
something?” Joster asked. Roxanne had to think fast. Her special bot-com to Dorian
was; 1) a secret, and 2) illegal.

“Oh, right I keep forgetting you can’t com me when I’m on a
haul. Only the Inc. can do that. Sorry, so what’s so critical Joster?” Roxanne
asked, covering her mistake.

Joster continued to pull himself through the hatch, fell to
the back cab floor, removed his helmet, and met face to face with a grinning
and growling Rose, who never slacked on her role as rig chief security officer.

“Hi Rose, how’s life been treating you? Mind if I deliver a
message without you eating my face?” Rose relaxed and gave a positive nod, after
she was sure of his identity. An actual visual and smell ID was always safer.
But because he could not enter the control cabin, Roxanne spoke to Joster
through her com.

“Okay Joster, nice to see you. What was so important that
you’d risk a flash freeze in a tunnel security prison to tell me?” Roxanne set
the rig to auto and watched Joster through the control cabin portal, hand on
her sonic pistol, just to stay on the safe side. You never knew if even a good
friend had been pirate-recruited these days.

Joster took off his head gear, gulped in the fresh oxygen
and said, wide-eyed,

“Gimlet’s gone missing!” HE SAID IT LIKE HE WAS ANNOUNCING SHE
HAD BEEN DIAGNOSED WITH LEPROSY.

                                                           
                         
7

“THEY USED TO TREAT LEPERS IN THIS PLACE.”

Gimlet stared up at what looked like an old time Navy Seal
type of guy. You know the kind, with huge muscles all over, short cropped sandy
light brown hair, ruddy skin, very nice blue eyes…glowing blue eyes? She shook
her head. That’s when she noticed she’d been chained to the wall, arms and legs
shackled far enough apart so her lock-picking abilities would be useless, but
not so far as to be in a compromising pose. She was wearing only a huge grey
t-shirt with AFA embossed on the front. She leaned over to her arm to activate
her bot-com tattoo.

“It won’t do you any good in here. The place is underground,
lined with security mesh. Actually I haven’t been able to detect any waves
escaping the place. It must have been set up as a holding cell for torture or
something.”

The Seal-looking guy was sitting on the only chair in the
room, reading an article on the saber tooth tiger de-extinction project from
Science
News
Weekly
. He had coffee. Gimlet might even tell this guy her name
if he got her a cup.

“Don’t worry; I have no plans to torture you, Gimlet
Nampeyo. You want some coffee?” The magic words; he handed her the cup of
steaming brew. It tasted like real Kona.

“Who are you, and where am I?” Gimlet asked, after gulping
down half the cup. It would make her have to pee, but she needed to clear her
head. The last thing she could remember was a bug-bite sensation on her neck,
when she’d turned left into the party tunnel entrance. She wondered how long
she’d been out.

“We gave you Neuro-Pop™ laced with fentanyl and a touch of
ketamine. We also gave it to that Mormon following you back at the party tunnel.
The stuff works instantly but leaves a son of a bitch headache. Take these.”
Big Seal guy held out two blue pills.

“I don’t think so.” Gimlet shook her head. She didn’t want
to risk being knocked out again, or spilling her entire life story if he slipped
her truth pills.

“Suit yourself; keep the head blaster. But you should know
that we could have injected you with just about anything, including truth drugs.
You have nothing new to tell me, Gimlet Nampeyo. I already have your entire
dossier. By the way, you aced your finals and got two offers for senior robotic
tech jobs at
Cyber-facials
and
Stemworm
. The second shouldn’t
surprise you. Songtain’s been after Roxanne forever, and taking you as a
hostage or employee would be an ideal approach to his getting at Roxanne Smoot,
don’t you agree?” The seal guy put down the science journal and started to
pocket the pills.

“Okay, give me the pills. If all you want from me is a Leo Songtain
hostage bounty, then I might as well sit it out without a head basher.” Gimlet
swallowed the two blues and finished the coffee.

“I repeat my two questions. Who are you, and where am I? Oh,
and what happened to my clothes?”

“That would be three questions, Gimlet Nampeyo. Your clothes
are being washed in cyber-wipe so no one can track you. You are under about one
hundred feet of earth, in what we think was an old prison cell or bunker. I’ll
leave it up to you to surmise where, and who I am is not of concern to you, not
just yet.” Her huge companion got up, took the empty coffee cup, and asked,
“More coffee?”

“Molokai…we’re on Molokai. I remember reading about how they
had tunnels all over the islands for US soldiers, during WWII. So this must
have been used for captured Japanese soldiers. Yes, more coffee, thank you.”
Gimlet did not see why she should be impolite to her guard. He was probably
only doing what he was told.

“A very interesting thought, but I never do what I am told,
and I am not your guard. Your guard would be a big brainless thug of a guy
named Ron. He’s standing outside, and no, he can’t read minds. You and I are
the only ones here with that special talent. Molokai was the correct guess, by
the way.”

“What do you want from me, Chad Yac?” Gimlet could do the
mind reader thing too.

She was pissed at herself for not checking that out right
away. She had been a university student for too long, forgot some of her rebel
training. She cursed herself for not being more careful when she’d entered the
tunnel, and for not having her mother’s special ability of doing a mind fuck. Gimlet
was mostly normal, not all mutant like her mom. Her dad was not a mutant at
all; he was an organo-digitally enhanced clone, with an almost limitless
archival data storage capacity…but he was otherwise pretty human, in a reverse
singularity sort of way.

“You’re not the same guy who was following me all over the
Ginza. What happened to him?” Gimlet noticed her head was not knocking anymore.
Whatever he’d given her, it was really fast-acting. She thought she could have
used that during exam week.

“No, he was quite a nuisance. He’s now wrapped in shipping
tape, crap-wrap, I think you call it, in the back of someone’s rig bound for
Hong Kong, I believe. Well, now that you’ve been properly brought up to date, how
about some breakfast. I take great pride in my culinary skills. This region of
bubble-stop #3, or rather, Pirate Bubble-stop #3, the under ocean rest area,
but underground in our case, has some excellent regional cuisine. Care for some
spam and eggs, shipped over daily from Lanai?” Chad got up to leave, smiling a
really rather attractive smile. If she were not his prisoner she might even
take him to lunch, or maybe more.

They both smiled at that thought, and he exited her cell,
leaving her rather embarrassed. Gimlet drifted off to sleep for a few minutes,
still trying to metabolize the residual drugs in her system. It was not
unpleasant in her cell. They’d been careful not to shackle her into a weird or
revealing position, and her mattress was very nice, some cellular foam that
read her body’s position and took it into consideration. It was probably a
posture sleeper, or something very expensive. She hadn’t noticed she’d fallen
back asleep until Chad returned with a plate of food that smelled like she’d entered
heaven.

“I took the liberty of adding macadamia nut pancakes with
coconut syrup. The syrup actually tastes pretty good when poured all over the
eggs and spam. There are some up sides to living with #3ers; nice and close to
Lanai. Oh, they are pirates, but with a hold on supplies for Lanai, that R&R
Island over there, they get handled with soft mittens by the WME; they get the
best food supplies of any bubble-stop I’ve ever been in. Lanai depends on them
for safe
Stem-wad
®
delivery. It’s probably why they haven’t been
seawater purged by the Inc. yet.”

Chad placed the food near to Gimlet, careful not to get too
close. Neither wanted a wrestling match, and even though Chad was much bigger
he was aware of her martial arts training from the rebels.

“So we are on Molokai. That R&R Island would be the
Refresh and Restore Island Retreat on what was formerly called Lanai, the place
where the CEOs get new faces and bodies, then recuperate into
seasoned minds
with new bodies
, as the advertisement states.” Gimlet stuffed a chunk of
spam into her mouth first, after reciting the famous vid ad. Her rebel skills
were coming back. Always eat the protein first; it stays with you the longest.

“You pass. Yes, this is Molokai, and we are across from the seasoned
mind, new body island, as you so colorfully put it. This means we are less
likely to be searched, and it’s a safer place to store you. So, finish your
breakfast. We have business to attend to, Gimlet Nampeyo.”

Before Gimlet could respond, because she had a mouth full of
eggs, Chad left, shutting the first of what looked like two solid steel doors.
They had regular locks. If she could even manage to touch her bot-com tattoo,
she would still not be able to send a message to her dad, and he would not be
able to help her with non-digital locking devices anyway. Besides, they’d placed
her underground in a sound-proof room, so she could barely hear the
conversations going on outside her cell.

For the first time in her life she was stymied. Chad locked
the second door with a key that only he and another guard on duty each had, and
that each wore on a metal chain around his neck. And to make matters worse,
unlike her mother Dina, she could not do a mind fuck on that guard. But, the
place was not totally sound-proof. Gimlet could make out the conversation
between Chad and the guard outside her cell.

“Remain here outside her cell. Don’t even think about going
in there, especially if she cries and screams for help. Do you understand me?”
Chad spoke brusquely, and with what appeared to be final authority, to a weasel-faced
guard. The guy was terrified of Chad; you could tell that by the way he danced
back and forth on his army-booted feet.

“Yes sir.” Was all he said, and he stood at attention like
he thought he was some sort of trained real WME soldier, and not a #3er pirate,
with teeth in great need of dental hygienics.

Chad left the guard, walking back to his office. He could
not wait until this was all done. He hated having to deal with the pirates. Chad
was not sure he could trust any of them. But his own people would die if
something was not done, and soon. Those nineteen remaining clones would be
delivered to the docks in Las Vegas in two days, and then Dina, the clone-killer
obsessed mother of his prisoner, would summarily eliminate most of his family.

Chad left the guard, treading silently on soft-soled grab
boots, to the room he’d selected as his office. He knew he was walking a fine
and dangerous line dealing with the pirates. If they knew he was a clone
soldier, or that his prisoner Gimlet was a half-clone, the pirates would sell
them both at the slave market; they’d each go for big vouchers. But he was
desperate. Chad sat down at his desk to go over the options.

“Why can’t the rebels just leave it be? Clones have not
attacked any rebel enclave in ten, maybe twenty years. I know the history. A group
of clones killed Dina’s father, Jordan Nampeyo. But that was years ago, and it
was the rebels who’d first attacked us. We’ve changed since then. Why can’t she
at least check the facts? We’re gene drifters.”

Chad knew that most of the clones had been genetically
lobotomized to have some serious serial killer instincts. It was initially a
problem in his group, when they escaped from Kyoto after that attack, to hide
for years on
Deceit Island
. He was only ten-years-old at the time, and
locked in a cell with the other “younger experiments”, as they were referred to
by the scientists.

“You would at least think someone like Dorian would
understand. Somatic mutations do occur; genetic drift can happen. We aren’t all
killers anymore, and we have a right to live, just like Dorian, and Dina for
that matter.” He mumbled to himself as he reread Gimlet’s dossier. Chad had
launched the current plan; grab the daughter, get her mother’s attention,
demand a meeting with Dorian the rebel leader…even have himself tested if
necessary. He would volunteer to be a rebel prisoner if he had to. Surely he
could talk some sense into the mother, or more likely, Dorian; call off what
amounted to a clone-culling mission by the rebels. “You’d think they, of any
group, would be accepting of
the different
,” Chad mumbled.

Chad had approached the pirates with his plan the previous month.
The pirates of #3 dearly wanted a piece of the regeneration market at Lanai;
especially after they found out they’d been targeted by the Inc. for robotic
outsourcing. They needed the funds to live, for citizen job skill enhancement,
for vaccines; the list went on and on. Bubble-stop #3 was underwater, right off
the coast of Lanai, the Refresh and Restore Spa and Retreat Island, R&R
Island for short. It was the world famous resort for CEOs and their families to
go have their faces, bodies, even organs swapped for cloned replacements.

Sitting in their tiny Inc-controlled underwater bubble-town
just off the coast of such wealth must have driven the citizens of #3 to their
current, less than legal actions…or at least some of them. That was why they’d
insisted on going for Roxanne Smoot, first. She hauled a full load of
Stem-wads
®
eastbound, and they’d go for big chits on the Blacks, enough to procure R&R
shares big time, get a small piece of the action-game for the pirates.

Plus, there was the added huge bounty placed on Roxanne for
live delivery to Mr. Leo Songtain, that Stemworm CEO. What they did not
appreciate was the iron hold the Incs had on stock ownership. It was a capital
offense, life-long flash freeze to sell stocks to non-corporates. It would
upset their economic levels. Chad had agreed to kidnap Roxanne from her rig,
splitting the bounty with the pirates. But he knew the stocks would be out of
the question. He just wanted to get Dorian’s attention.

Well that had gone really well. He had no idea the rigs were
so carefully secured from entry. His two clone brothers, Jason and Saul involuntarily
provided a hand and arm dinner for Rose, Roxanne’s legendary flesh-eating Doberman
co-pilot. He’d had to dig into his dwindling emergency stash to get Jason an ID
for entry to R&R for hand regeneration procedures. Saul had bled to death
from loss of his arm, before they could get him to a regen-station. Chad still worried
that Jason would get ID’ed as a clone and culled. It would be another two days
before his hand replacement was complete; before the cooking was done. Then he
and Chad had to find the rest of his clan, to help them escape before delivery
to certain “Death by Dina Nampeyo.”

So in the meantime, he’d suggested an alternate plan to the
pirates, snatch Gimlet from the party tunnel, and trade her for Roxanne. Snatching
someone from the Nipon party tunnels was always easy. And he knew Roxanne would
volunteer herself to rescue Gimlet. Then Leo’s bounty for live delivery of the
object of his obsession, Roxanne Smoot, would bring about a billion gold
vouchers to buy up some unlisted stocks from the Blacks, or at least keep the
#3ers in food and vaccines for a while.