The God Class: The Third Nick Wolfe Sci Fi Adventure (Nick Wolfe Adventure Series Book 3) Read Free Page B

a stand-up guy — kind of a Boy Scout, now that I think about it. He was always stepping in between members of the football community and those of Nerd Nation. How are you friends with that guy?”
    “Aw, cut it out, Pax. He’s a good guy and has been a good friend to me. He helped me out when I broke my ankle. Not with the injury, but in keeping my spirits up.”
    “Okay, fair enough. If you want, I’ll wait with you and when he comes by we can ask him if he would like to come too.”
    “I think that’s him coming up the driveway now.”
     

Chapter 5
     
    Nick checked his equipment and waited. Everything was state of the art, BioMek Horizons’ latest and greatest — the last word in surveillance for the next 10 years. He was fairly sure he was in the right area, but after looking around the supposed landing site with none of the normal evidence of a landing or a crash, he started to doubt he was even in the right neighborhood. Fortunately for Wolfe, close was all he had to be. He had a hundred flying drones at his disposal about the size of mosquitoes that he had casually dropped at strategic locations: near the suspected landing site, the highest ground, and at various places along the road to the site. While dormant, only 360-degree motion sensors were active. Once a sensor was set off, the drone would automatically set off an alarm at Nick’s workstation, show him the source of the disturbance, and await instructions, all while recording and feeding video to his tablet. He could have worked with a unit the size of a wristwatch, but that meant he would also have to have special glasses or a cybernetic modification so he could see the miniscule images. No, Nick Wolfe was a little more old fashioned than that. He liked to have it all laid out in front of him whenever possible, and from his hotel room he could see everything.
    For most of the day there wasn’t much activity. Wolfe was a little surprised there wasn’t more activity from the local farmers, but most of the work was done automatically. There was a fuel truck going in, and at about mid-afternoon there were two trucks coming with supplies, and several delivery drones leaving with grain, and coming back empty. Wolfe stopped counting them at 50, and reset his motion parameters for ground activity from 0 to 10 feet in the air.
    He was a little bored and had been hoping to see something out of the ordinary, but even the road vehicles were probably auto-controlled and stuck to their schedules like clockwork. For a short time, he allowed his thoughts to wander to his fallen comrade, Josh Taylor, who had been killed on Pangaea and cloned by Gretchen Brooks, who was also a clone. He knew she was smart enough to know the clone would not necessarily feel the way she and the original Josh Taylor felt about each other. At least not once he realized his memories were implants, and that he was not actually who he thought he was.
    But yet she did it anyway. She probably figured she had nothing to lose since her original Josh was already dead … and she got what she wanted: The new Josh seemed to understand her motives and feelings, and embraced Josh’s memories as his own. What else was he going to do at that point? Be content to be a clone with no identity, no purpose, and no mate? Or be Josh Taylor, a trained soldier with survival skills, in good physical condition, with a good woman who loved him? At first he remembered Taylor was something of a charmer when he wanted to be, but how much of that skill or desire was a part of the new Josh Taylor? He shared Taylor’s DNA, and most of his memories, but ultimately had his own identity.
    Upon realizing his “memories” were someone else’s, how much weight did they really carry? There’s useful information like how to disarm an improvised plasma bomb, and the muscle memory that comes with being a master of several different martial arts and fighting techniques. On the other hand, there’s information that is