by Kieran Shea
PAA: Do you want a glass of water?
JF: [Inaudible] Just get on with whatever you’re going to ask.
PAA: Maybe we should arrange for another time.
JF: Do I look like I have time to spare? I’ve signed up for the next Embrace ceremony, you officious putz. Just finish the interview. Please, just ask whatever it is you’re supposed to ask.
PAA: Okay, then. Let’s see. Above average arrest records, substantial and noted commendations, etcetera, etcetera… Well, if it weren’t for several of your recent outbursts and the aforementioned medication indulgences, I’d say your career record is quite admirable and worthy of full termination benefits.
JF: [Inaudible] Nope—not fine. Not fine at all. Here it comes…
PAA: Excuse me?
JF: I said, do you have any tissues?
WHY SO BLUE?
In the diagnostic silos of Fogarty’s Medical Conditions and Diseases Index, the following brief synopsis is provided for Second Free Zone cases of the affliction known as Depressus:
Depressus (VAST D.), n.—a severe, stage-classified psychosis. VAST D. is a mental disorder affiliated with the liberalized citizens of the Second Free Zone confederacies (suborbital tracking orbits) characterized by abject downward mood swings, sudden bouts of misplaced rage, anhedonia, sleep disturbances, and feelings of worthlessness and hopelessness. The diagnostic criteria for VAST D. include the following: a depressed form, a marked reduction of interest or pleasure in virtually all normal behaviors, as well as occasional flare-ups of intense anger [see substratum Endogenous D., Exogenous D., bipolar disorder, also 2-79A Syn. Clinical depressive disorders.] According to the FG & SFZHO Depressus affects 5.5% of the liberalized citizens of the Second Free Zone, and the negative bearing on commercial interests is estimated at 16 trillion credits annually. The disorder is theorized to result from a genetic electrochemical malfunction of the limbic system aggravated by continued variance in high-altitude exposure in the Second Free Zone. Recent research has shown the number of glial cells in the subgenual prefrontal cortexes of people with familial VAST D. to be significantly dwarfed by those of otherwise mentally healthy citizens. Treatment with psychopharmaceutical agents (including tenth-generation tricyclic antidepressants, nano-selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors [NSSRIs], ancient monoamine oxidase [A-MAO] inhibitors) is ineffective for sustained control in most cases. To date, long-term stabilization of the disease is impossible, with affected persons opting for now-sanctioned mass-suicide events.
Ah, Depressus.
Quite the bitch, but it sure does thin the herd.
GOING DOWN
Koko rockets down the plummet chute.
It is greasy in the chute’s core. The inner funneling dimensions wind her around and around as though she’s being flushed through an industrialized carnival ride, and the tangy pong of runny garbage and dried urine is so intense it makes her eyes water. Knowing she needs distance, she tucks in her limbs for speed. How many decks has she passed? Thirty? Maybe fifty? How big is Alaungpaya anyway?
Soon a graffiti-streaked sign whips by overhead, indicating Koko is nearing the plummet chute’s bottom and approaching Alaungpaya’s main entertainment decks. Easing her rate of speed with friction points on her boot heels and chafed elbows, she readies herself and three seconds later is ejected out a set of rubberized doors with all the fanfare of a mechanical fart.
Koko lands on her back and loses her wind. She sucks and sucks and finally finds her air. Whipping her head around, she discovers she’s in another access tunnel and quickly gets to her feet. She straightens her soiled tank top, dislodges her shorts from the crack of her butt, and prepares herself for the bounty agent. After a full minute of her being cocked in a ready stance and waiting for the redhead’s imminent arrival, it dawns on Koko she must have lost the bounty agent, at least for now.
Relaxing some and adopting the stride of just another SFZ citizen, Koko struts out of the access tunnel. In some buffed chrome near the tunnel’s exit, she catches her reflection and notices a splotch of blood still on her chin from when she started to mark the woman. Koko licks her thumb and wipes the blood clear.
Emerging from the tunnel, Koko enters a colossal skylighted atrium that stretches upward through the rigid circularized core of Alaungpaya. A set of elevated and dual-directional causeways encircles the hive-like core and apparently serves as the main thoroughfare around a huge centralized casino. The perimeter of the concourse is lined with narrow storefronts, seedy discotheques, and the standard hot-holes of the vice trades. Not overly crowded, but not exactly starved for business either; it’s pretty easy for Koko to blend into the multi-pigmented ebb humping its way around. She trucks left on the inner loop, the cacophony of a thousand whistles and thrums amplifying into an oceanic roar in her ears.
She needs a place to hole up and get her head together, and there are a lot of tall time-break bins and hospitality grottos to choose from. Even if she’s still being tracked by that redhead, it would take the agent more than a little while to search all the endless crannies towering around her. Koko’s blood buzzes. Gunfights on the fly with a cluster of cocky CPB security stiffs are one thing. Getting all personal with someone trained to kill you in hundreds of brutal ways is another matter entirely. Regretfully Koko knows she should have just finished that bounty agent off and taken her eye, but that dopey kid with the weird yellow hair was watching her.
No matter, Koko. Keep moving.
Keep moving.
In her past, when booking a place to stay, Koko has always opted for ponying up the extra credits to be around a better stratum of people. But seeing that things have gone all tiger-fight with Delacompte siccing a freelance asset after her, Koko realizes she needs to ratchet down her usual modus operandi. She looks for a cheesier tower unit, and after three thousand meters slaloming through the crowds, she settles on one called, of all things, Wonderwall. Wall, yes, but calling the low-rent tower facility a wonder is more than a bit of a stretch. Twenty stories, set back on a furcated spur, with daily and extended occupancy rates, it’ll have to do. Koko pushes through the frosted lobby doors.
Inside it takes Koko more than a little while to manage one of Wonderwall’s unstaffed hospitality displays. The interface is a convoluted mess, the Byzantine navigation resets no doubt programmed by fumble-headed curve draggers. Finally, she manages to steer through the registration silos, and selects an available smoking room on quick exits with a decent view of the concourses and Alaungpaya’s central casino. Koko could have opted for an exterior unit but her hunch is, if Delacompte sent that bounty agent after her, she’ll stand a better chance of catching the woman by making a fuss down on the concourse than by taking in a pressurized view of the weather-strewn sky. When she confirms her reservation, a bright blue balloon squeaks—a message from Wonderwall management congratulating her on her reservation. A second balloon fades in on the display, boasting that her room includes a state-of-the-art flash shower and complimentary mini bar. La-dee-fucking-dah.
Koko crosses the lobby and one set of two lift doors yawns wide, sensing her presence. As she enters the lift, it takes her all of a half-second to make an anemic-looking dealer painted in the corner like a pale stain. The dealer wears a checkered polyester cowl, and the give and take between them assures them both that they are not enemies. Using some universally accepted sign language, Koko signals for a quarter pouch of crinkle-flake and the dealer’s sleepy eyes drift clear for the transaction. He holds up three fingers as the price. Koko nods and takes out her credits. The dealer takes the credits, and with a smile he hands over a black plastic baggie bundled with a red pig-tail ribbon.
Once upstairs and in her room, Koko is nearly bowled over by the sharp, acrid stink of chlorine disinfectant masked pathetically with a crisp haze of lime. As described on the registration display in the lobby, the view from the room’s smudged window does tunnel down onto the barge’s casino, and, parting the thin blinds, Koko stands still for a moment.<
br />
A few hours ago she’d been asleep with Archimedes without a care, and now this. This. On the run and on her own, her confidence shaken. For a moment Koko recalls all her recruitment trips to Melbourne and Perth, when she found Archimedes and the rest of his giddy mates bopping around the discotheques. Those hot nights when she worked him through his boywhore tryouts and found Arch knew how to please a woman in all the right ways.
The stress of her predicament finally starts to catch up with her. She shivers in the chilly recycled air and thinks about The Sixty. Pines for it, actually. All the space, light, and pore-drenching warmth. Images of Archimedes’ blown-apart corpse and her bar aflame rush back, and Koko has to steady herself.
She pushes back the bitterness.
No time to feel sorry for yourself, Koko. No time for thinking like that at all.
Koko inspects the room’s touted mini-bar basket and discovers some rolling skins along with some arousal lubricants, an assortment of tiny bottles of cut-rate alcohol, and a Jacob’s ladder of antibiotic condoms. The package of rolling skins is Second Free Zone micro, cherry-flavored and emblazoned with scrolling advertisements for oxygenized supplements. Koko flips the package and snaps out a couple of papers. Crushing some of her newly purchased crinkle-flake into the skin’s fold, she rolls a tight, sedative smoke to even out her nerves.
She pats her pockets and looks around. Keeping with the lowbrow nature of Wonderwall, no free laser sticks are about to spark her spliff to life, and she hangs her head. Great, more of her crappy luck on the wane.
She rolls a few more smokes for later and drops the unlit spliffs on the night table next to the bed. Then she snatches a couple of bottles of generic beauty from the mini-bar basket and—crack-crack—pours the two vials of knockoff booze straight down her throat to avoid the cheap taste. Her esophagus protests the liquor’s burn, but the sudden warmth in her belly helps a bit. Koko kicks off her heavy boots and strips out of the rest of her clothes.
Entering the bathroom, she takes a thin white towel from the rack and takes a good look at her body in the wall mirror behind the sink. Her piercings, the slight cellulite dimples just off the curve of her snugged panties, the tattoo of scrolled flames slashed up and down her inner right arm. Just past a slight sheen of alcohol fat, she still has some of the hammered definition left to her stomach, and she’s grateful her small breasts aren’t losing their youthful lift just yet.
After removing the rings and studs from all her piercings and placing them on the edge of the sink, Koko considers the two major scars on her body: a mottled star on the right side where a rib poked through and a sash of pink tissue on her upper left shoulder. The second scar was her first major wound from action. Caught the full, brunt force of a rebounding mortar pulse on deployment in some godforsaken North African ghetto, back when she was all gung-ho and keen to bring the hammer down on de-civ militants. She can’t recall how or where the rib wound happened or even when. 2510? Or was it 2513? The later year sounds right, but where was it? So much proxy-nation and de-civ craziness the years blur. The rib wound might have happened during a building collapse in Luxembourg, she can’t be sure.
Koko braces herself against the sink.
Delacompte.
Sending an SI security team and now some bounty agent to take her out? What, over some vendor infraction with a couple of vacationing Kongercat re-civs? This has to be some kind of a mistake. It doesn’t make sense.
Standing there, Koko recollects a time when she accidentally met up with Delacompte at an airbase near the last played-out wells of the Samotlor oil fields. At the time, Koko hadn’t shared any duty assignments with Delacompte for a few cycles, and she remembers they were both powering on toward separate syndicate actions: Koko heading to a six-week deployment on lignite resource operations in Aduun Chuluu, and Delacompte locked in on an unclassified government assassination. It was, as they say, just one of those things. A chance crossing of paths on a layover, duly forgettable.
Delacompte claimed her assignment was to be one of her last stints in the field and the hefty payday was more than going to cover her tuition at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques in Paris. What was it Delacompte said she was going to specialize in? Oh yeah, that’s right: restorative consumption patterns. Whatever that meant. Strapped up tight in their BDUs, they were throwing back drinks at the airbase bar when Delacompte shared the news she was planning to pull the plug on her military career.
* * *
“Wow, so Portia Delacompte is giving up the life? Well, I can’t say that I’m totally shocked. Always knew you were headed for something better than the rest of us, Big D. Someplace special.”
“Can’t fight forever,” Delacompte said. “And you and I both know there’s no real future in all this. Think about it. Over the long haul, doing the dirty work on planet restructuring for the corporate masters and their sock-puppet governments? You’ve seen the life-expectancy charts for humps like us. Sooner or later, we all go down. And when we do, we go down ugly.”
“Says the Miss Officer Class here buying the drinks.”
Delacompte frowned. “Don’t give me that shit. Yeah, I’m raking in the officer credits these days, but so fucking what? I’ve earned it. Don’t forget, I’m a lot older than you, Martstellar, and I’ve been lucky too. Sure, you stay with it and quit bucking the systems, maybe you too can get promoted someday, but then what, huh? Answer me that. Trust me, girl, being an officer ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. Just penury of a different color, and me, I want more out of the time I got left.”
“You’re not that old.”
“Cresting thirty-four, babe.”
“Oh, boo-hoo-hoo. You look great.”
“Thanks.” Delacompte stabbed her finger on the top of the bar. “But what about you, huh? Don’t you want something better than this?”
Delacompte’s question made Koko uncomfortable. What was she talking about? More than being a soldier for hire? Honestly, Koko didn’t know. Commercial mercenary work was what Koko had trained for. It’d been her life, her entire world, and she felt she was good at it. Even in her rare free moments of reflection, Koko never truly considered anything other than the next mission that came down the pike or her mind-numbing times off on leave. Yeah, the grind sometimes got her down, but Koko assumed that was just part of being a warrior on call. After all, she was engineered in the third reconstruction collectives. At fifteen she tested average intelligence, but received high marks for stamina and physicality. What else was she supposed to do? Work in some goddamn re-civ manufacturing plant? Be a passive service worker and click off time in an underpaid, trenched existence like an ordinary schmo? No way.
Koko tried to change the subject.
“Well, my hat’s off to you anyway, D,” Koko said. “I mean, if I had a hat. Hey, do tactical helmets count as hats?”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
Koko swallowed an inch of poison from her glass and coughed.
“Which one?”
“Don’t you want more than this?”
“And what? Go to some fancy business school like you?”
“Maybe. Or something else. You’ve got options.”
“Options? Yeah, right. Face facts, D. I’m not as smart as you. Never have been, but I sure as hell wish I was. Like you said before, you’ve been really lucky and you’re older, cranking in that officer-class pay. I’ve always admired you, and maybe someday when I make a decent rank and don’t screw it up I’ll think of something else to do. But for now? Like it or not, this is the life I lead.”
Delacompte picked up her drink. She took a reflective sip and then motioned to a feed monitor above the bar, squinting.
“You know, if you cycled out of your current obligations you could always try your hand at some cage raging.”
Koko looked fuzzily up at the feed screen. The monitor was showing some old highlight footage of TFFI tiger fights with the sound turned down low. Koko grimaced and then spluttered.
<
br /> “Oh, come off it. Don’t make me laugh…”
“I’m not kidding around,” Delacompte persisted. “You can make some decent credits in those matches, and you’re a natural. Don’t forget, I’ve seen you in close-quarter situations. When those tiger fighters hit it big, some of them make good money.”
Koko drank some more poison. “I’ll pass.”
“Hey, if you want, I know somebody over at TFFI. Guy is a former syndicate merc, just like us. I could patch him and see if he can get you a slot in one of their training programs.”
“Oh, yeah? What guy is this?”
“Former demolition specialist I fucked back in Panjshir.”
“Oh, in Panjshir. When the hell were you in Panjshir?”
“Year back.”
“So this guy? Any good?”
“I think so.”
“You think so?”
Delacompte looks off with mock wistfulness. “Ah, there are so many. I get confused.”
They both broke down laughing.
“Yeah, well,” Koko said, getting control of herself, “thanks for the suggestion, but seriously. No way in hell am I doing some media slut’s version of staged combat just so some loser on credit-view can get off, thank you very much. Besides, that stuff, D? Full-on tiger fighting at the professional level? From what I hear I’d last a day in those fighting pits, tops. Even with their so-called training program, don’t you know those pros love taking out fresh meat like me? I hear they even handicap the matches to weed out the up-and-comers. Probably drop me in a four-on-one bout for my first go-around. Oh, yeah, some big payday that would be. Eye-gouge and body-bag central.”
Delacompte shook her head and set down her drink.
“You know,” Koko said, “now that you’re going all hotshot professional, you’re going to have to play nice on a whole other bunch of fronts.”
“I know…”
“All buttoned up and grounded. No social wilding. Definitely no more sportfucking whoever happens your way in Panjshir. I hate to bring it up, but have you selected your creed yet?”