Revolution World (15 page)

The senator squinted at his friend. "I can never understand how an educated and intelligent man like you could be so blindly, stupidly optimistic. It rankles."

The governor made a rude gesture. "Did you hear about that military raid on the Texas Omerta Embassy a few weeks ago?" The senator winced and nodded. He wondered if the stress of his job would finally turn him senile.

"They even have DARPA out pawing through people's dirty laundry now," the senator cried with outrage. "DARPA is supposed to be a lab full of R&D geeks. Instead of hanging around the lab, building us bigger guns, they go tearing across the countryside, ruffling the feathers of the few remaining people in the UN that tolerate our military's antics."

The governor nodded wearily. The events of the last few weeks had dented his armor-plated optimism. "Look, can't we just talk about football for once?"

The senator didn't even bother to reply. He was busy tossing beer down his throat. As soon as he came up for air, he bellowed,
"And apparently that insane commander they have running DARPA was five seconds away from hauling the entire embassy off to prison. If they hadn't recalled him in time, the only living thing left in Texas would be radioactive pigweed. I tell you this mania for torturing people is going to get us all killed."

The senator was like an excitable terrier with a fat rat. The governor realized the only way his friend would turn loose of this topic was if he had thoroughly shaken it to death. Resigning himself to a lecture, he leaned back in the booth. He let his mind wander as his friend ranted.

"This craze for electrocuting people's eyelids started just after all the Patriot Act and Homeland Security stuff did. They passed a law that legalized torture for what they called 'unlawful enemy combatants.' They decided it was all right to torture people whether they were in or out of the United States. And we've been at it ever since," the senator finished triumphantly.

"But that was almost eighty years ago," the governor protested mildly. "Maybe 9-11 hysteria caused this or maybe it was emo music or all the hormones in the drinking water. If it was really as bad as you make it out, surely we'd have stopped by now."

The senator shrugged. "I don't know. We have been awful busy with The Troubles and all the wars over the last couple of decades. Maybe people are just too scared to protest."

"God, if I weren't drinking, you'd depress the hell out of me," sighed the governor.

"Just looking at your face depresses the hell out of me, Bubba," the senator shot back with a grin. "We need another round."

The governor often noticed that when the political outlook got dismal, the senator got positively chipper. He was willing to bet the man walked around during the height of The Troubles with a song in his heart and a skip in his step.

He got up to go to the bathroom, winding his way through the eight-piece string quartet inexplicably but enthusiastically plucking out the blues. On the way back, he stopped at the bar to grab more drinks.

Sitting at a table near the bar were three people. They were so obviously trying to avoid attracting attention that they drew every eye in the room. There was a tall, thin woman who was talking in a low, urgent voice to an aggressively handsome man in a beautiful suit.

The governor watched them out of the corner of his eye, purely because they looked so uncomfortable. He noted the untouched drinks sitting in front of the first two. The third man had finished his drink and was playing with the ice in his glass. This man was shorter, darker and a little chubby.

The musician had taken a break or else the governor would never have been able to overhear their conversation.

"Our project is vital to national defense and we are prepared to pay quite handsomely for your time and effort," the woman was saying. If the governor had to guess, he'd say she was trying to charm the man, but her smiled just looked menacing. He expected her to start growling and snapping at any moment.

The man in the suit said nothing, so she continued, "I'm sure if you are concerned with the legality of the arrangement, we can get our military contacts to ensure you some sort of pardon for any, shall we say, ambiguous interpretations of your actions." The smaller man shot her a startled look.

She's just trying to con that guy
, the governor thought. He dawdled at the bar to satisfy his curiosity.

"Medea, I don't think..." the smaller man started to say.

She cut him off. "Shiva let me handle this."

The large man in the suit studied them both for a minute and then said slowly, "So, what I'm wondering is, if Malsanto is so rich, why not just buy whatever it is you want from Floracopia all above board and legal? Or if Malsanto is so powerful, why not just get your big impressive military friends to seize it and declare it classified?"

"We tried to get the bosses at Malsanto to buy it, but you guys won't sell," Shiva said, petulance heavy in his voice. "This military contract is in a holding pattern until we get it."

"Shiva, will you shut up?" Medea hissed. "If you were half as good at splicing as you are at running your mouth, we wouldn't have this problem."

"It's not my fault Malsanto doesn't give me the resources to do the job," Shiva replied sulkily.

"What? And those women at Floracopia have so much more money and equipment than you? Please. Their splicer has always been better than you. You can't even reproduce her inventions. I don't even want to think about those monsters you created from the notes we got out of that break-in," she sneered. Shiva gave her a black look and got up for another drink.

Medea seemed to realize that she was not making the best impression on her mark. "So do we have a deal?" she asked smoothly, turning back to the man.

Unfortunately, a large, loud group trooped through the bar door at that moment. The noise was just distracting enough that the governor lost track of their conversation for a bit.

He tuned back in when the large man in the suit got up and began to leave.

"Wait," Medea cried. "We have a deal, right?" Shiva shot out of his chair. The man in the suit said something the governor didn't catch. And with that he walked out of the bar. The other two fumed and stormed after him.

The governor walked back to his table, deep in thought with a beer in each hand.

"What did you do, get lost?" asked the senator blearily. He had kept himself busy watching the flickering wallscreen above the bar. It was showing a football game. He fell upon the beer the governor passed him like a starving man on a steak dinner.

"Where is Floracopia located? You've done some work with them, right?" the governor asked.

"What? Oh those splicer women? I worked with them to fix the honeybee problem in my hometown. Charming women. Kind of strange. They're out in Ambrosia Springs," the senator replied.

"Isn't that where that Omerta embassy is?" the governor asked.

"Why you are right, now that I come to think on it. And that is a tiny little town. Imagine that," the senator said, his mind on the football game.

"I think we better keep an eye on Ambrosia Springs," the governor replied.

"Should we get some food before proceeding with our beverages?" asked the governor, with a mild slur in his voice.

"Oh well, I suppose. Has that restaurant across the street gotten any better?" he replied.

"Not a bit," said the governor cheerfully. "But the chicken-fried steak is plentiful and they will give us a discount on drinks."

"Let's do it," said the senator. He could tell they were in for a long night of serious drinking and a man needs to have something in his stomach on these occasions.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

T
he second time Seth told Clio he was a vampire, it slipped out by accident and she almost missed it. They were bouncing down a dirt road in the middle of nowhere through the pitch-black night in a pick-up truck with a biomass retrofit. The truck stank like rotting fruit, but neither Seth's hovercar nor Clio's scooter would have survived the muddy road.

They were following half a dozen little red blips on the GPS. Clio made a mental note to ask Seth how he'd managed to get such detailed and obviously recent maps to this area. Since The Troubles, satellites had been notoriously unreliable over Texas, especially satellite imaging.

"Tell me again what we are chasing out here," Seth barked sternly, gripping the wheel.

Clio was kicking herself for letting him overhear the conversation she'd had with her hysterical lab assistant. It's just that she'd never had a test group escape before. The rabbits had been let out by accident. Two test groups escaping within a matter of months reflected poorly on her ability to maintain order, she felt. Luckily, they all had GPS tags imbedded so she could track them down. Unluckily, Seth had insisted on coming with her.

"It appears that a group of my gene mod dogs have gotten loose." She said this calmly as her eyes stayed glued to the map.

"I don't understand. You normally work on plant mods for farmers, right? Why did you have a dog strain in the lab? Some old lady decide she wants Mr. Tumtums back with some special new tricks?" Seth was trying to crack a joke since Clio was wound up tight.

"Oh well, you know, research," she said vaguely, hunching her shoulders. She rummaged around in her bag, found a package of cookies and tore into it.

"I'm sorry we had to skip dinner," she said as she offered him the cookies. After their tubing date a few weeks ago, things had seemed so promising but then she hadn't seen much of him. She had been hoping their date tonight would get things back on track towards some kind of a relationship or at least some more making out. There seemed to be little chance of that now. Instead of sitting in a nice restaurant flirting, they were out here.

He shook his head, too focused for food. "So, what happened? Did someone screw up? Did your security system break? You didn't have a break-in, did you?" Already he was mentally improving her security system. His uncle was going to kill him for spending all this time on her lab, but he'd already come up with some great algorithms for keeping her out of trouble.

"No, that's actually the part that concerns me," she admitted. "Either these dogs just got really lucky and knew exactly which wire to chew and which set of doors to duck out of or my intelligence booster experiment worked a lot better than I planned."

Seth was reflecting on what Max and Gloria would to say to him about tapping into DARPA's spy satellite network so that he could make sure his security measures were working. Wait, what did she just say?

"You boosted the intelligence of a carnivore? An already fairly intelligent carnivore?" Oh man, that was illegal in every country in the world.

"Oh come on. Dogs? The ability to learn silly tricks is not an indication of intelligence. And how can one really measure intelligence? You and I know tons of very bright, very useless people. Have you met my Uncle Chuck? He can splice genes like a timeshare salesman can fleece old people, but he still gets lost in the grocery store. You can't tell me that's intelligence." she scoffed.

"Clio!"

"All right, fine. I got the idea from those rabbits. They were so much smarter than they should have been. I wanted to isolate the splice so I could recreate it. I was working on some guard dogs for you since those DARPA guys keep showing up. But I wanted to make them kind of like ninjas, you know? Around but not looking like security. So they needed to be smarter. So I could teach them to talk," she blurted this out in a rush and looked at him guiltily.

Seth stopped the car and stared at her for a full minute. Then he laughed. He laughed harder than he had in a long, long time.

He turned to her with a grin and said slowly, "Just so I'm clear. You were worried about me, so you genetically engineered a pack of talking ninja guard dogs for me?"

She nodded, feeling silly.

"Wow. You are so perfect for me."

Clio had a sudden revelation. Seth was a great guy but he got a little weird about social interactions. Maybe if she wanted to have a relationship with him, she needed to be direct and clear so that there would be no misunderstandings.

"I really like you," she said slowly. Seth turned to give her his full attention. He felt she was trying to tell him something. But the moonlight shone through her hair and she was so beautiful. Seth forgot every thought that had ever passed through his head.

"Fantastic," he whispered, his eyes going soft and luminous as he leaned towards her. The cab of the truck became quite steamy before they remembered the whole 'escaped genetic monsters' issue. Luckily, the dogs appeared to have stopped.

"Would you like to come over for dinner with my family on Sunday?" she asked him as they rounded the final curve. She felt sure he understood what she was trying to say earlier. "I have to warn you that my mom is a terrible cook."

"Who cares?" he laughed light-heartedly. Kissing Clio was like downing six shots of vodka. Seth always felt a little tipsy afterwards. At least, he had both times he tried it. He planned to continue that experiment as much as possible. He was a good scientist and felt it was his duty to verify if the effects were reproducible. He chuckled to himself over that idea.

"What are you laughing about?" she asked.

"Wait until I tell all my vampire friends that I have my very own pack of hell hounds. They'll be so jealous," he replied, not wanting to seem overeager.

This was when the dogs finally came into view. They were sitting calmly in a half circle as if waiting for the truck.

Seth stopped the car and just stared at them. Then he turned to Clio and asked in a slightly strangled voice, "My pack of hell hounds is a bunch of Pomeranians?"

"You see why I had to boost their intelligence?" she said as she eyed the tiny, fluffy little dogs. "Normal ones snort when they breathe. I couldn't take it."

"But. Seriously? Pomeranians?"

"Hey, I have limited space in my lab and these guys grow much faster than larger, more imposing breeds. And no one will ever suspect these are vicious guard dogs."