Cloneworld - 04 by Andy Remic Read Free Book Online

was nothing but a muted, static hiss. Obviously, here in the cell, signals were blocked.
    "Bugger," said Franco, and tried hard not to fall asleep.
     
    "Good morning!"
    She stood in the doorway to the cell, and she was smiling a Big Smile. Franco groaned, and sat up, rubbing at his tousled beard and scratching his shaved head. Where am I? What's going on? What happened? Consciousness gave him a kick. I'm in prison. I'm a prisoner. Ah, shit, that happened...
    Franco squinted at the woman. She was tall and thin and gangly, and wore an asexual simple black outfit Franco had seen on all prison warders. She had a mass, a mop, a tangle of frizzy black curly hair, a mass so amassed it towered over her head by a good foot, and fell away down her back like a plate of chaos-spilled barbed-wire spaghetti. The hair was a mess. It was more than a mess. Franco scowled at the hair. It was a fucking abomination. And yet there was something different about this woman, despite the bad hair, the narrow, cruel eyes, the weird nervous ticks when she spoke or smiled. She carried a strange little air of authority. As if she was important. Or as if she thought she was important, which could amount to the same thing when applied to any individual's behaviour.
    "I," said the frizzy woman, with an air of dignity, "am Theresa Sourballs. Teddy, to my enemies. A-ha. Ha."
    "So?"
    "I am Governor of the Nechudnazzar Correctional and Reintegration Facility."
    "So?"
    "You may address me as Ma'am ."
    "Fuck off."
    Sourballs stared hard at Franco Haggis. "You will pay me some respect, young man!"
    "Or what you gonna do? Put me in prison?" He sniggered. Nobody else did. He realised Sourballs was backed up by about six hefty guards with steel truncheons and Steyr laser cannons. Franco clamped his mouth shut. If he'd had a hammer and nails, he would have nailed it shut.
    Sourballs's eyes had narrowed, and she turned, and waved to two guards. They wheeled in a terrible and frightening contraption, a huge black cube with trailing cables and weird sharpened spikes. Franco gave a little whimper as his mind tumbled back through the years to his incarceration as a mental patient at The Mount Pleasant Hilltop Institution, the "nice and caring and friendly home for the mentally challenged." This all felt terribly real and horrible, and Franco regressed, Franco mumbled, Franco shivered, and Franco realised that everybody was staring at him.
    "Not the electrodes," he blurted.
    "Pardon?" said Sourballs, frizzy hair bobbing.
    "Don't stick 'em in me! I beg you! I'll tell you everything... not that I bloody know anything, nobody round here tells me nuffink."
    "Haggis, this is a TV."
    "Eh?"
    "A TV. It shows TV pictures. Shows and filmys and the best show ever created: Torture! Until you killed the star, that is..."
    "Ahh. Yes. That little misunderstanding."
    "No misunderstanding, I believe, although we'll let the judge sort that one out. I think you'll find she'll find you guilty. And then it's the death penalty for you." Sourballs smiled. Her teeth were small, yellow and crooked.
    "Who's the judge?" said Franco, scowling.
    "The Mistress. My boss. She's also the Prime of Core Government, and owns the TV network that employed Miss Opera, the woman whom you decapitated. Switch on the TV!"
    The TV, which was indeed a TV and not a torture contraption, was switched on.
    Franco blinked, at an enlarged photograph of his very own face. At the bottom of the screen scrolled other news items - gang rapes, murders, false gangers, breach of gangercide, the impending war with the orgs, an earthquake in northern Clone Terra that killed one thousand, five hundred and eighty seven gangers - but here and now, Franco Haggis was the most important item of news.
    Franco paled. This didn't look good.
    The newscaster was speaking. Sourballs turned up the volume. "And as can be seen by this photograph, Franco Haggis, most abusive murderer of the lovely, talented and beautiful Opera, erstwhile TV