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

begged Eldridge, a rebel sympathizer who’d previously picked Dina
up while she was on another mission, several years prior, after the Las Vegas
Clone Games. Eldridge had been looking for Dina, as he did his usual haul with
his, then five-year-old daughter, Roxanne. He picked Dina up and drove her, for
five years. She was two months pregnant at the time, with her and Dorian’s only
child, Gimlet. He delivered Gimlet, who was named after Dina’s mother, in the
back of his cab. Roxanne thought Eldridge was the daddy. Dorian was. They all
had a convoluted history, and while it was always great on the holidays to see
Roxanne and Gimlet back together as genetically unrelated sisters, sometimes it
was difficult for Dorian and Dina, but especially for Eldridge.
    “Mom, I gotta tune out. My train arrived. I’ll com you when
Roxanne gets here. Love both of you. Take care and be careful, Mom.” Gimlet
touched her arm, and her bot-com tattoo tuned out. It would stay that way until
she touched it herself, in a special sequence, having been tuned by Dorian to
respond only to her DNA.
    As she turned right to walk to the train dock, at first she had
not noticed the man who followed her. Many people wouldn’t. He’d been selected
by Leo’s chief of security to appear very ordinary, to be unmemorable. He was
careful as instructed, not to follow too closely, or to be seen. But Gimlet
made him at the station entry. After all, she could read minds if the
individual was close enough. Besides, Leo had been dumb enough to send a white
guy in a black suit into the Roppongi to follow her.
    Gimlet had a Mormon-ish looking follower. She thought she’d
just let him tail her and see what was up. But she had already informed her dad,
and he was also watching, from high on the mountain pass at rebel headquarters.
So Gimlet was not particularly concerned. If her dad thought she was in any
danger he’d retune one of the recon satellites to laser fry the guy.
    She continued on to her last University exam, in
astro-organo-archeology, running to make it in time, in her real jeans, funky
t-shirt, and soft, black cube fighter boots. Dorian watched her on his sat-vid.
He thought she looked exactly like her mother, and she thought she would
disappear after her last final…into the Nipon party tunnel for a couple of
days.
    At about the same time in bubble-stop #4, Roxanne and Rose
were attending their weekly one hour ecumenical church session, required for
all Inc. workers. Attendance was logged in via one’s employee ID tag, and
Roxanne thought it best to get it out of the way before they logged back in to
work in the morning. Their next down-time was in Tokyo, and attending one of
the Ecumenicals was a mob scene in that city. The church thing had started a
while back, when the Ecumenicals won the last election. But in a nod to
economics and the worker efficiency protocol, the Bible quotation on the
Sabbath had been massaged to include all seven days each week. What the heck,
you could select your own day to rest because it was technically almost Sunday someplace
in the solar system, at some time; right?
    “Sit still Rose, we have to do this. Stop falling asleep.
We’ll be tagged by a nano-drone and made to attend the next hour’s service.”
Roxanne was sitting with Rose in the back row of the church section of the
whorehouse, in front of the coffin-filled rig-ryder sleeping quarters. Most of
the other rig-ryders, previously present in her dad’s bar, were now in
attendance, trying to stay awake, or at least not get drone tagged for repeat
attendance. Morton sat up front next to his newbie trainees, hands folded in
his lap, with a practiced look of wonderment on his seriously in need of
retirement face. He was still in his orange Inc. uniform; maybe it was all he
had to wear. The interns were taking notes on the sermon.
    The section was Mathew 19:24. “Again I tell you, it is
easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich