Free Gene Drifters: The Clone Soldier Chronicles-Book III by D.J. Takemoto Page A

muster at the lift security vids for the
ever-paranoid legal counsel floor of the Songtain office building. Dorian just
sighed when she explained things to him. He knew his wife would never pass up
the opportunity to help a slave escape. She’d done it for him once; had helped
him escape from his underground prison.
    It took a bit longer to seduce Max out of his protective
head gear. He and she were both in his inner office, lying on a white polar
bear rug, half naked by the time he removed the apparatus and turned it to off.
Dina left him with the certainty that he had indeed thrown in Irma as a bonus
to Ms. Turner’s client, to sweeten the clonie deal. That’s how he would
describe it to Leo the next morning, when he arrived at the outer penthouse
office to go over the morning stock trades. Leo would totally agree.
    By midnight, Irma was in the back compartment of Morton’s underwater
low-way rig, with a new rig-ryder approved ID, and eastbound for bubble-stop #4.
Eldridge said he could use her help in the kitchen, but she’d have to work
minimum wage, and sleep in a made-over storage space at the back of the house. Dina
burned that Roxanne Smoot bounty poster in her Hong Kong hotel room fireplace.
If Roxanne ever saw it, that poster would end up in a ball inside Leo
Songtain’s smooth, HAIRLESS, TINY BUTT.
     
                                                                  

 
                                                              
                            6
    AND SPEAKING OF LEO’S BUTT, it was currently on Roxanne’s
mind.
    “Man that was a bizarre dream.” Roxanne stretched across her
single-sized bed, wedged against the wall of her 10 by 10 foot bedroom.
    Space is preemo in any plasmon under ocean bubble-stop, but
especially the ones with no close land base. Roxanne’s little town is just a giant
under and on the ocean floor, plasmon bubble. They’re larger versions of
vending machine rest stops, but with the necessary robotics to check the rigs
and loads, and for use by rig-ryders to do their down-time. The bars, whore
houses, and churches logically followed. To even have your own room in a
water-based bubble-stop was living in the lap of luxury, especially to a native
born rig-ryder like Roxanne, who’d grown up living in the back compartment of
her dad’s rig.
    Eldridge spared nothing to trick out his baby girl’s room.
He’d painted it blue, a color that would go better with her fire red hair, had
a plasmon window installed so she could watch weird deep ocean fish swim by,
and even added a desk, chair, and small bookcase, complete with a collection of
real paper books. The later were yellowed and somewhat moldy, leftovers from
when Eldridge was a kid, growing up on land, in a place near Liberal, Kansas.
    Roxanne loved to read real books. Besides Jane Eyre ,
another of her favorite books, to read when she was still little, was a story
about a girl named Laura, who lived in a little house in the middle of nothing.
Roxanne could not even imagine what it would be like to live in the middle of
nothing. She’d always been in a rig, surrounded by everything and everyone, the
medley of engine noises singing her to sleep at night. But, she loved her room,
even though she’d had to wait until she was nineteen to get it. She raised her
head up on one elbow, turning to Rose.
    “I had this nuts dream that I was back in grad school
playing lacrosse against Leo’s team. It was that time I sent the ball straight
into his butt, and knocked him flat. He had this thing for me even back then. I
think it was because I was the only one who was nice to him. He was such a
smart ass rich little freak. Everyone used to make fun of him. I was just being
nice, I guess. Then he got obsessive about me; I guess that’s what I get for
being nice. You remember me telling you