Part 30

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Both Orren and Tannac hurried down the most likely path toward any other holding areas, but stopped short upon seeing an ornately decorated doorway in the wall of the building they were passing alongside.

"There's another doorway not far down" Tannac added. Orren looked at her. "Your inferior sebacean eyesight might have missed it," Tannac explained.

"My eyesight is perfect, and sebacean eyesight is superior in most useful light levels. I can see there was a door further down. However, I didn't see this entrance on the data provided in the briefing."

"Curious?" Tannac baited Orren.

"It would be prudent for one of us to check. It would be more prudent if one of us checked, and one of us only waited to see if the other entered safely before proceeding to check other areas as I had initially proposed."

"All right" Tannac rolled her head back and flexed her neck, which crackled. "Aaaaaah. I'll take this direction, you cover and then proceed to other areas."

"You?" Orren was incredulous.

Tannac held up her gun. "Bigger gun, all that?"

Orren closed her eyes a moment, nodded and took a covering position while Tannac walked in. Tannac closed the door and Orren made a step back, to go to the guest area, when the door opened again. Orren turned back toward the door.

Tannac backed out of the door in an exact reverse of the way she had entered, closing the door again and slipping her head close to Orren with one eyebrow flat and the other raised. "Did you know the Minister takes images of himself and his guests masturbating and sets them on continuous replay all around a hall?"

Orren closed her eyes a moment, shook her head slightly and walked around Tannac. "Thanks to you we know that now, don't we. If you're not proceeding to ascertain holding areas, I will. Take the guest quarters then." Orren entered the room with her pulse rifle at the ready.

Orren backed out of the door in an exact reverse of the way she had entered, closing the door again and blinking. "There is another unmarked door in this direction to reconnoiter."

Tannac nodded with her brows raised and fell in step behind Orren.

---

Larran looked around his environment. Everything was a trifle alien, except the clothes he himself had fancied wearing. Larran sat at the head of a desk with a harsh light over his head and people of seemingly dubious character in all the other seats, except John, who sat at the end of the desk.

"You the Godfather" the shadowed people lining the sides of the long desk proclaimed in unison.

"So all the niceties aside" John put his feet up on the desk and clasped his hands behind his head "what's on your mind you've gotta visit mine, godfather?"

"I'm not your father" Larran simply replied.

"No, but you sure like to play God, daddy-o."

"Oh say....where is she?"

"Usually where you leave her" John replied with a pat, mild face "except when she decides not to stay there just over her old man."

"Ah I see you've at last accepted what I'd suspected for some time. She has a special attachment to you. It transcends servant and master."

"Yup that cut rate clever bad guy face you're insinuating with is on the money, for a change. Never was her servant, hell I never did cotton to the idea of slavery anyways. Gotta credit her, she never tried to boss me, neither. She's a Pip."

"I hardly believed the pretense of her being a woman of high position I'm sure you realize" Larran returned, but eyed John very warily.

"Kinda figured you'd never buy that stuff from what you think of her, hell what allot of people think of her." John shot a straight look to Larran. "Most she'll do is throw shadows at you, bud, but she's always a woman to me. You know I never used to think that guy's songs were too deep, but I guess I missed it." John rested his elbow on the table and his chin in his hand while he wondered off in thoughts. "Not surprising, really, I get a feeling I was missing the whole thing about her before we got here. You going anywhere or anything, I don't wanna bore you talking about our love life or something you wouldn't know anything about."

Larran appeared uneasy at the inexplicable reversal of John's tactic and promptly stood. "Yes. You need to come with me, yourself and Chiana, to meet some visitors."

"Really, visitors. Shouldn't we slap some fancier nipple rings on her before she meets anyone?"

"Your irreverent remarks used to humor me, but lately I find you impetuous and grating" Larran walked closer, intense frustration seething from him. "I insist Chiana and yourself join me at once."

"You insist?" John looked at him, incredulous. "I was about to apologize for my rudeness, man. Then you gotta get ruder. Row, row, rooter, that's the name, go row, row, rooter the hell outta my head, get it bub?"

John opened a giant drain hole in the floor behind Larran, but before he could shove Larran into it, Harvey loomed up to his side. "Do ya wants I should talk to him, boss?"

John cast a long look aside to Harvey. And then John took a closer look down at the bed he found himself laying in. He appeared to be in a man's red velvet and silver evening robe with Harvey decked out the same, laying on his back beside him in bed. "Thing is" Harvey said in caricatured Brooklyn gangster accent, absently flicking ashes from his cigar off the side of the bed "we gots to figya timin' here. He wants you should go withs him, dere's gotta be some play. Is dis a good time ta be puittin' da spot on da boss man eh? Is you show da deal's done gone down?"

With some hesitation, John checked under the covers to make sure it wasn't any weirder than it already looked. "Gone down? Buddy, it's so f*cking down its-" Johns rebuttal was interrupted by the realization that the sheets were breaking out into a smoldering fire over his crotch. Harvey stamped out the fire with a flyswatter. "Hell and damn!"

"Never gots it tchu yo mind yet has ya?" Harvey leaned close to John's ear. "Never smoke in bed."

"So" John broke the pause while the smoldering sheets extinguished with a hiss. "what are you saying?"

"I keeps da boss doin da daince, keeps da boss busy" Harvey flicked the ashes of his giant cigar over the smoldering sheets on John crotch. "You goes talks to da little lady, does whateva yous does ta unwind, see. You thinks it ova. You comes back an we plays it likes you plans it, see."

"Yeah. Hate to admit it Harv, but you're makin' allot of sense. Shitty accent's gotta go, aaaand the theme's a little thin, but hey it's not bad for two people with nothin' in common sharing the same wedge o' swiss cheese."

"Agreed" Harvey observed "abouts da resemblances tos a smidge a hole ridd'n chiyse. Hawevas. We makes funny bedfellas."

---

John walked in through the tilted doorway and shut it behind himself. Looking around, John found himself in a familiar yard. But there was no sign of Chiana. John walked toward the house. A moment later it occurred to him where she might be. John walked over to a large sycamore tree. "Hey Pip" he shouted, tugging the rope hanging from the trapdoor of a tree house.

The trapdoor opened slightly and Chiana peeked down. "Forgot something?" she asked with a snide smile.

"It's not a girls only club right?"

"Wha?"

"Can I come up?"

"Myeah" she simply opened the trap door.

John pulled himself up by the rope, only to have it snap before he reached the top. Laying on his back on the grass below the tree, he held the rope up over his face. "What does it tell you when you try to break your neck in your own head?"

"It's only your head on the other end. No big loss if ya break it off" Chiana laughed up in the tree house.

"Ouch" John cringed. He got up, dusted off and stood under the trap door. "Will you throw down the ladder, honey? Pip?" After a quiet moment, the rope and board ladder tumbled down and crashed onto his head. On his back again with a board across his face and ropes over him, John squinted. "Oh this is ripe."

"Crichton?"

"Just a moment, hon, I'll.....be right there. Maybe." John stood and gathered up the ladder. "Uh Pip? Hon, love muffin, sugar pie? You ah just catch this when I toss this up? Okay? Ready?"

"Crichton."

"Yeah?"

"Quit killing time and get your eema up here."

John struggled the rest of the way in through the trap door. Chiana rolled her eyes a bit but held out her hand and helped him in. "I'll be Jimmy Rushing. Darned if I know how I got up here babe, but thanks." He laid down beside where Chiana sat on her knees. He looked her over and had to admit to himself that she looked very cute in the plaid shirt, blue jeans and sneakers that he'd worn as a little kid.

"You live here?" she asked.

"No. Just wanted to sometimes. I'd mostly come up here when I wanted to think. Girls weren't allowed" he looked aside at her and smiled.

She smirked, then laid down across his lap. "Why? Couldn't think around girls?"

"Maybe. Doesn't matter, I don't think I could think much anyway."

"Yeah especially if you kept the girls away" Chiana teased. "So what did you want to think about that you're trying not to think about?"

"Larran. He's here, barging in where he's not welcome and" John stopped, distracted by Chiana while her hands slid into her jeans.

"And?" she stopped and prompted him.

"And I'd kinda made up my mind to try something on him. Like....you know, destroy him utterly."

"Except?"

"Well we don't know the rules, might be he could take us down with him."

"Ah no! No, he's the one who's gotta go!" Chiana jerked up onto her side facing him, rested her head on her hand and propped her elbow into his crotch. "And you're not risking your eema to get his....mbut with us...." she lifted his shirt and pulled it back, licked her tongue on his stomach and teased at pulling some of the hair on him "together, bet we could do it. Hey can we get real so we can have some real fun?"

"Glad we're not, my mivonks would be pretty useless by now, Miss. And for another thing, there's Harvey. Yeah I know I ought to tune out the creepy Stern of a Beach, but hey. He wondered if this was the right time and all, and well, I think he had a point."

"Yeah?" Chiana looked to one side for a moment, then returned to playing with the hairs on his stomach. "What did Larran want, anyway?"

"I, hey" John squirmed. Chiana stopped pestering his stomach hairs and John looked down to realize his stomach was suddenly hairless. "Oh. Sorry, I don't know how this stuff works. It's my head but, I'm still used to thinking it's just mine."

"Yeah" Chiana sneered and pulled his pants up to peer down and see how much was now hairless. "Woo. So what'd he want?"

"Us. To go with him, some people he was insisting we see."

"We?" Chiana looked up to John with a distant look of being lost in thought.

"Yeah. Guess I shoulda insisted on getting some specifics there."

"No dren. Can he hear us?"

"Too late to worry and nothing we could do if he can." John played with some hairs on her head, but found he missed the feel of her real hair. "Dang it's memorex."

"Don't want your hair, want your wholeness, wanna love you, want you to love me" Chiana spread a hand out over his stomach and kissed it. "Yeah...." she said wanly, suddenly making John aware that she hadn't intended to speak what he'd heard. He'd felt it directly from her self. John grabbed her roughly around the shoulders and laid back with her tumbling down alongside in his grasp and making a show of squealing and resisting. The next instant she lay smiling next to him and kissing his forehead. Or licking. Or she wasn't sure which, so she was doing something of both.

John snickered. After taking a breath it sunk in deeper than before. "So he goes or we go?"

"Neither. Both." Chiana replied. John looked at her, confused. She nodded once, which cleared nothing up in his mind.

"Huh?"

"Well." Chiana reached down to his crotch. She looked back up to him with sober eyes in deep feeling for something for a moment before smirking with one side of her mouth and shrugging. "First one" she produced something that looked horrifyingly like a testicle in front of his face "then the other" she produced the second. Blinding pain began in his crotch and spread upward into a terrifyingly real body. John began to scream.

---

"Waaaaaasssshit!" John screamed, aware only that he was in an all too real body with all too real pain. Trying to prompt himself for any relief of distraction from the pain with the instincts of one now becoming accustomed to being wounded, he shot upright and tried to orient himself. He was sitting upright in the fold of a blanket hammock, naked and covered with some gel-like goo.

Suddenly he remembered having emerged from some egg like form to find himself twinned. He also realized that he hadn't remembered it had happened at the time, because he remembered himself standing on some steps of a transport and being shocked to see another of himself turn the corner. What had happened when? But the thoughts, like the memories, disintegrated in the acid of pain.

John was yelling in pain. Chiana sat half upright and slung her head up to look around, her back and head trembling from damaged muscle and a white pain that filled her. The screaming was coming, but at that instant the instincts of a lifetime of surviving hardships, desperate situations and wounds were automatically overruling the instincts that made her want to curl up and yell. He head was fitfully holding up and she looked down at the surroundings. She sat upright in the fold of a blanket hammock, naked and covered with some gel-like goo.

Around the room were apparatus that reminded her of the areas where she'd found what she now knew to be the attempts to clone herself. A Nebari male stood at the door beside Kastara or one of the Bannik males. Her ingrained memory for faces seemed to think the Nebari was the male she'd seen on a resistance message John and herself had discovered early in their captivity. Neither men did anything but watch blankly.

A glow caught her eyes. On the opposite end of the room, Larran sat, motionless in the glow of the Stakira Oshana. He didn't appear to be a threat at the moment. Was Oshana holding him, she wondered? Her eyes shifted to follow John's yells. She saw John in a similar situation to her own, but trying to remove goo with his hand and screaming.

John was in pain, and for a moment she began forcing herself up to try helping him. The pain driven nerves failed her and she tumbled ungracefully into a seat on her knees on the slate floor beside the blanket hammock. Dazed, she gaped at the floor and all her senses blurred. Finally the pain flooded within and a scream ripped from her.

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