Clove: With all due respect sir, you know how well she responds to orders and authority. She has become even more dangerous and unstable than usual. In my opinion, she has become a liability and should be immediately terminated. I further recommend that you activate her DL implants to neutralize the threat she presents to the mission, the Company, and the other representatives. Monique and I will then immediately return the crew to the Albedo and recover the merchandise.
Ipsum: Our Special Recovery Team is on their way to the ship now. The product will be recovered. As for Keva, the Board would rather keep her around.
Monique: Frankenstein’s monster.
Clove: Agreed. You’re creating a monster you won’t be able to control.
Ipsum: I’ll note your recommendations on the matter. For now, we need to handle things as carefully as possible.
Monique: Sir, Keva traumatized the surviving crew more than the pirates did; she killed one for no reason other than she was having a temper tantrum. Additionally, she came right out and told the crew that the cargo is more highly valued than their lives are. How is this handling things as carefully as possible?
Ipsum: Tell Keva we will have a Super Osprey pick the three of you up in Mombasa. There will be new weapons onboard, including PHASR RNG8s. The three of you will be sent to Tijuana to recover reps two through five.
Clove: Three of us?
Monique: Again, with all due respect sir, I decline.
Ipsum: This isn’t an option, it’s an order. However, there will be a significant bonus for successfully completing this assignment.
Clove: Sir, a bonus doesn’t do us any good if we’re not alive to spend it. The second Keva realizes that this isn’t all about recovering her pet Ladyboy she’ll come unglued again, take off on her own and leave us hanging if she doesn’t just kill everybody first. And even if we get over that little barrier, how are the three of us supposed to take on one of Mexico’s most powerful cartels?
Ipsum: I have a bargaining point to use against Keva. She’ll do as we wish. And you should have more confidence in your own abilities.
Monique: What bargaining point?
Ipsum: Medya, the Kurdish girl that Keva rescued in Iraq.
Clove: The bazaar rat in the homemade Comsuit who attacked us on our way to the airport?
Ipsum: Bingo. Keva has taken a liking to her. If she doesn’t obey orders …
Monique: Medya is thirteen years old!
Ipsum: And on her way to becoming a rep. Keva doesn’t really care much for her own life. However, she does care for the life of this girl, and for some reason, Rinchi.
Clove: And if we still refuse?
Ipsum: We are well aware of what happened in Iraq and how your after action reports are somewhat more … inaccurate, shall we say … than is usually the case. Should the House of Saud ever discover what really happened to Prince Al Omid and his entourage, it is not entirely unlikely that they would contract with MercSecure to apprehend and deliver the involved parties directly to them.
Monique: This is blackmail.
Ipsum: No, I’m telling you what will happen. You call it blackmail, I call it the truth. Keva is valuable to the company, as are the two of you. If you want to put it in numbers, she generates nearly four hundred million dollars in yearly revenue for us. She is routinely requested and she does a bang-up job, when she doesn’t go off the deep end. The two of you together generate about fifty-five million dollars. Keva is an asset to the company, an asset that must be protected and recovered.
Monique: So we’re babysitters?
Ipsum: Babysitters with big guns. Get to the Port of Mombasa and take the Super Osprey to Tijuana. I’ll deal with Keva directly once she is on iNet again. Make sure she reconnects.
NINETEEN∞
Rinchi’s Comsuit operator’s compartment cum escape pod was in trouble.
Above a certain altitude, the arms, legs, weapons, and primary power cell all jettison; the unencumbered operator’s compartment gently parachutes to earth as the airbags provide extra cushiony softness – or so the manufacturer’s literature states. The set-to with the aeros had occurred in that gray area – not really high enough for the parachute to properly deploy, but too high to just separate the pod and drop. The onboard AI decided to deploy the chute, but the PHASR fire that injured Rinchi had also damaged the escape pod.
Centrifugal force pinned Rinchi in place as the pod spiraled out of control at the end of a fouled parachute. The crash cage failed to lock and half the airbags had been holed in the blast. The capsule’s structural integrity had been further degraded when Yeshi and Noah had forcibly removed the Operator Emergency Egress hatch.
It was an extremely shitty situation.
Rinchi dug herself in as best she could, but odds were high that her imminent, fiery, explosive extinction was only seconds away. Cyber-wired humans and properly modified Humandroids can take direct control of most MilSpec Comsuits, but Rinchi hadn’t been upgraded yet. Sans the upgrades, she had to shout out voice commands just as an ordinary human would have to.
Not that there was any time for any of that.
The tallest building in the outlying slums of Tijuana was a three-story multi-family structure made from shipping containers, plastic pallets, scaffolding pipes, corrugated sheet metal and anything else that might remotely keep the weather out. The escape pod smashed through it like a de-orbiting minor planetoid; the fouled chute snagged in the debris, slowed the pod somewhat, and then detached.
The escape pod bounced through an outhouse, a straggly vegetable garden and a chicken coop, finally sliding to a halt open-side-down in a combination living room-kitchen-bedroom-game room-sauna-solarium-observatory of the two-room plywood, blue tarp and corrugated sheet metal shanty.
The pod had energetically filled itself with the dirt and trash and debris it scraped up during Ms. Rinchi’s Face-Down Wild Ride, and Ms. Rinchi was pretty much immobilized even as she conducted her post-crash self-assessment.
Short version: she felt like hammered dog shit. Longer short version: Noah’s PHASR blast had damaged the left side of her face, iNet modem, ocs, left shoulder, and upper left arm – she was already planning to make that poncy little e-poofter a special project as soon as this was over. Crash damage: arms battered but functional, both legs inoperable. CPU undamaged, ancillary systems nominal.
She spit dirt and chicken feathers. “Computer.”
~Standing by.~
“Get me out of here, NOW!”
~Unable to comply. Catastrophic failure of all powered emergency extraction systems; manual emergency extraction system damage exceeds design specifications. Emergency transponder inoperable, am unable to summon assistance.~
“Well that’s just fucking perfect,” thought Rinchi.
The capsule creaked and shifted as someone began to lever it over.
TWENTY∞
Captain’s log.
Blue ocean all around suffocating and majestic. Charts, random holoscreens and a big-ass steering wheel made of wood (just for show) complete the inside of the wheelhouse of the Puta Madre, which is currently sailing towards Cuba, home to a population of millions and America’s most famous prison after Alcatraz.
Bays full of Pigs and vessels full of premium cigars surround the island that the Castro Bros fingered; the island that the Russians stage-managed from afar and Obama unlocked, allowing Uncle Sam’s bastard offspring to comb the island in pursuit of eco-unfriendly golf courses and cab rides in rusted jalopies through the narrow streets of Havana while uploading selfies to various social media sites.
Sing it with me:
~Guantanamera, guajira guantanamera. Guantanameraaaaaaaaa, gaujira guantanamera.~
Love that old ditty.
Yes, this is Memito (my Spanish name – FYI), and yes I’m on a boat heading towards Cuba next to Yeshi, my hot little chicita bonita. Nelly is resting in one of the rooms below deck with Noah and Rebel; I’m practically Bob Denver as First Mate Gilligan sans a bucket ha
t up here with Sea Captain Horatio McCallister and his grumpy-faced Humandroid matey. (In an unrelated note: please stop making new Simpsons episodes – ninety-two seasons is plenty.)
Aye-aye ye scurvy dogs! Avast ye! Batten down the hatches! Toss the landlubbers overboard!
Standing in front of me is none other than the man himself, well the Humandroid himself – Tim7. And I’m not going to lie, I’d love to get all Carlos Castaneda before dealing with the fact that last time I saw Tim7, he was ready to kill me. And it isn’t like there is a pink elephant in the room or something, but there is definitely some weird juju in the air between us as we shake hands, so I go ahead and come out with it.
“Glad you didn’t kill me back in LA, back when you were my patient,” I say with a slight grin on my face. “You really did me a solid there.”
Tim7’s eyes dilate as he scans my vitals. His hair is silver now and he still has perma-stubble on his chin.
“I guess I’m glad I didn’t either,” he says.
“That’s the spirit! You know, you’ve sure come a long way, from yoga instructor to vigilante,” I say, referring to the fact that he has been communicating with Humandroids via a shared message board using messages made by piecing together ten human languages (a character and script orgy that only Humandroids can decipher).
“You as well, from therapist to terrorist.”
I smile over my shoulder at Yeshi. “I’m kind of shit at both jobs, actually.”
“I figured as much, Dr. Lamar,” he says.
“Meme, you can call me Meme. Or Memito…”
“Memito makes you sound weak and foolish.”
“So, while I’m not that into sports, you might as well come right out with it. What’s the game plan?”
“The game plan is this … ” Tim7 folds his hands together. He has a very yogic gait about him, a fluidity that only comes with years of practice. I look to Yeshi, realizing we haven’t experimented much with Tantric yoga.
Me: Tantric yoga. Let’s get into it.
Yeshi: You need to be able to touch your toes first.
Me: I can touch my toes.
Tim7 clears his throat. “Are you listening to me?”
“Sorry! I was just researching … the salinity of saltwater on Wikipedia,” I say, going with the first thing that comes to mind.
He almost shakes his head. Almost. “The game plan is this. First, we go to Havana and from there, we go to Dr. Hewman’s home.”
“Do we have time to see any attractions?”
Yeshi: Behave.
Me: I’m trying!
Tim7 says, “No, we are going to go straight there. There is already an aeros waiting for us.”
“Got it. What about the FCG?”
Dr. Hewman turns and says, “We will thoroughly discuss ways to thwart the FCG. Remember, we want to be disruptive, not engage in open and blatant opposition. Ideally, they will never know that it’s us.”
Tim7 says, “We have someone on the inside of the organization; someone close to the top.”
“You do?”
“Yes, we also want to reach out to Bill Bleak at BlurYou.”
“Why BlurYou?”
“You don’t know, do you?” Tim7 asks. “A few nights back, Sauria sent Rinchi to try to persuade Bill Bleak to de-encrypt the BlurYou app both of you used to infiltrate the Shinagawa Headquarters in Japan.”
“Yikes.”
“Well, the mission failed, ending in several deaths on the rooftop of the Hilton in downtown LA.”
This doesn’t surprise me. I smile at Yeshi as I say, “Sounds like a real LA party.”
“Hardly, Memito,” Tim7 says. “Sauria paid a visit to Bill Bleak the next day, but Bleak met him with his remotely operated Humandroid replica.”
“A replica?”
“It’s expensive, but possible,” Dr. Hewman says. “Essentially, a person can have an exact replica made of them that they control through an NV Visor.”
“NV Visor? I thought those were only for Proxima dreamworlds.”
“This is a modded version. It essentially allows the controller to tele-operate the Humandroid corpus. Bill Bleak almost managed to kill Sauria with his doppelganger before it was destroyed.”
“So Sauria is fine then?” I ask, thinking of my bête noire. Can’t a man take a punch like a man and not send mercenaries to eliminate his puncher? Sure, you could say that I’m the cause of all this – please don’t, Reader – but you could also say that Sauria’s punk-ass did the opposite of manning up when he sent Gyatson after me back in LA, which triggered all this. All of it.
“Sauria had a heart attack,” Tim7 says. “He would have died, but he was saved by his Humandroid assistant, Heidi.”
“Damn, she should have let that Beluga Whale flounder.”
“Maybe, but there is always someone waiting in the on-deck circle to take over the role of El Jefe,” Dr. Hewman says.
He speaks my language…
Tim7 says, “We aren’t done with Sauria. He has direct access to people that would be hard to reach otherwise. That’s what we need to discuss – how we disrupt the FCG and at the same time, control Sauria.”
TWENTY-ONE∞
The skiff, piloted by the second steersman, Aman, approached the entrance to Kilindini Harbour at Mombasa. Keva stood behind him with her railgun still pointed at his back. Near her was Clove, representative thirty-one, the broad-shouldered older brother of Monique, currently below deck keeping watch over the crew of the Albedo.
Two Kenyan Ports Authority boats could be seen in the distance, making their way over to what was very obviously a pirate’s rundown skiff. A gun-drone was already overhead conducting a full EM spectrum survey.
Keva: Make this as smooth as possible.
Lorem Ipsum: You forget yourself, Keva; It is I who gives the orders. Don’t forget your role in all this – don’t forget Medya.
Keva squeezed her fist until her knuckles were white. Part of her knew how truly evil it was for MercSecure to use the Kurdish girl she’d rescued in Iraq as bait to keep her in line. The other part of her knew that this may have been the only way to stop her from killing everyone onboard, including Clove and Monique. MercSecure had the hook set firmly in her vaginal tract.
Clove would have presented the biggest challenge for her in terms of a fight. The fact that he was clean cut and his size would have given her a run for her money. Still, she could have taken him. After all, she’d fought bigger guys and both lost and won. This led her to think about Max, the South African mercenary she took out on top of the rooftop back in LA. It had been a few days now and he’d be after her soon. Through feats of modern science, it didn’t take long for people to recover from traumatic injuries, especially if they’d had their body parts replaced.
Images from the rooftop assault came to her – Rinchi holding Bill Bleak hostage, Monique with her quiet little pout, Max lying on the ground getting his limbs shot off. Paybacks are hell and somewhere, at the back of Keva’s mind, she knew that she’d get her karmic comeuppance one day as well. This was what kept her fighting. A dog-eat-dog world doesn’t even begin to describe the life of a gun for hire in the late twenty-first century.
What was her exit strategy then?
She was not yet twenty-three and one of the most dangerous people on earth. The exit strategy – all exit strategies – likely ended in her death. MercSecure would finally have had enough of her and give her the lead parachute, or someone younger, faster, tougher, and meaner would permanently retire her, or it’d just be wrong place and wrong time, the inevitable meeting with the bullet with her name on it.
To keep alive was to be alive, and while Keva wasn’t particularly survival oriented, some part of her wanted to make it to thirty. Just thirty. From there, she really didn’t care what happened.
“The Kenyans are approaching, Madam,” Aman snuffled. Though his broken nose was swollen shut and the stumps of his front teeth screamed for attention every time the air hit them, now d
idn’t seem like a good time to request medical attention.
“Madam? I’ve never been called that before.”
“It is common where I’m from.”
“And where’s that?” she asked, without any real interest.
“Islamabad.”
“You’re right, Islam is bad,” she said with a smirk.
“It is a city in Pakistan, twin city of Rawalpindi.”
“Is it worth visiting?” she asked.
Keva visited Pakistan on a mission about a year ago to run a security detail for Prince Shah Karim Al Bundy Aga Khan VII, a portly fellow who looked more European than the King of England yet was the Imam of Nizari Ismailism, the second largest branch of Shia Islam. All she could remember of Pakistan was that it was as heavily polluted as anywhere in the industrialized Third World, there were almost no toilets anywhere in the whole damn country, and the air smelled like shit and curry and burned your eyes like chlorine gas.
“Islamabad is worth visiting,” Aman said with a sad grin. “The Faisal Mosque is there, maybe more beautiful than the Taj Mahal.”
“That’s nice,” Keva said, her eyes flickering shut.
Keva: The Ports Authority is approaching with weapons hot.
Ipsum: Do not engage.
Keva: Not even a little?
Ipsum: This is a direct order.
“He says not to engage,” Keva told Clove.
“No shit. I’m not the one he has to tell.”
“Is someone being grumpy?” Keva turned to him.
“We won’t get any points for this mission because you’ve essentially shit all over the objective. No points means less pay. I’m not happy.”
“I guess that’s just the way the cookie crumbles. You’ll get a bonus for rescuing the kiddos in Mexico, so don’t get your panties in a bunch. This is what you Americans say, yes?”
“No, Keva, you made it crumble this way. Now we have to go to Mexico on what is essentially a suicide mission.”
“You are a weak, money-grubbing, piece of shit, Clove,” Keva said. “You’ll get paid, you whiny capitalistic pig.”
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