Koko Takes a Holiday

by Kieran Shea

  Flynn flags down his friend, and the big cook and Flynn confer across the bar. Koko can’t hear their low exchange over the surrounding restaurant noise so she rotates on her bar stool and checks out the room while they talk. Out of habit she takes in everything in a pattern. Evaluates the layout. Tracks her eyes over potential cover and exits. There is a large unobstructed view of the passing crowds outside the restaurant and occasionally there’s a curious glance from a patron considering the bill of fare posted near the restaurant’s entrance. Seems like most people in the place are abuzz and having a good time. Across the room, a couple claps with delight as their waiter proudly hands over two skewers of blazing meatballs.

  Flynn brushes Koko’s hand. When she turns back to face him, he holds up his cup.

  “Au now a wakari no hajimari.”

  Koko snickers. “You sound like you’re choking. Try saying that ten times fast.”

  “I’d rather not. Roughly translated, it means ‘to meet is the beginning of parting’. Kind of a thought on the transient nature of things.”

  “Pretty deep for a chef.”

  “Well, like I said, the big guy is a sucker for dying languages.” Flynn’s eyes drift left for a second and then return. “Hey, can I ask you something?”

  “Sure.”

  “When you were active—I mean, back when you were working for the multinationals—did you have to wear one of those,” Flynn scratches his temple, squints a bit, and looks past her shoulder again, “one of those imbedded contraptions?”

  “You mean an ocular implant? Yeah, sure. All militarized personnel do. Mine was one of the original series and a bit on the clunky side, but I had it surgically removed when I finished up. Why?”

  “Did it hurt?”

  “Not really. After the adhesives set into the cranial bones, you sort of just get used to it. Like I said, I had mine removed when I cycled out. Why?”

  Flynn polishes off the rest of his sake. “Oh, nothing. It’s just that there’s a woman with one over by the entrance, and, man, she looks like she wants to burn this whole place down.”

  Koko’s spine turns to ice. Instinctively, she slides her right hand under her jacket, eyes drawing inward.

  “Inside or out?”

  “Pardon?”

  Her voice is steady and low. “The woman by the entrance. Is she inside or outside the restaurant?”

  Flynn casually bobs right and then bobs back. He studies the look on Koko’s face. “Is something wrong?”

  In less than three seconds, Koko’s brain falls through the angles of the restaurant, cover, and possible collateral damage. Her heart slams in her chest.

  Good God, she thinks. Get a hold of yourself. Ocular implants aren’t all that uncommon—hell, plenty of militarized personnel travel in the Second Free Zone all the time. An imbed means nothing.

  But what if it’s the redhead? No, Flynn would have described her like that right away; those neckbands make a big statement. Then again, could it be a second agent? Beneath her jacket Koko depresses the safety on the Sig.

  She needs to look to be sure. A distraction, shit, she needs a distraction.

  While she knows she might regret it, Koko settles on the play. She leans over toward Flynn and places a hand on his knee.

  “Kiss me,” she says.

  Flynn blinks at Koko as though he’s not heard her correctly.

  “Come again?”

  “I said kiss me, Flynn. Kiss me.”

  Flynn dithers so Koko doesn’t wait for him. With a rush Koko leans closer and presses her lips to his. To encourage him, she zooms her resting hand quickly up his leg and cups his crotch.

  Flynn shudders and stiffens beneath her hand. Koko responds by giving the bulge in his pants an upward stroke. Hot and slightly sour from the sake they’ve enjoyed, Koko’s tongue bores into his mouth. Deeply.

  As their tongues intertwine, Koko hooks a leg around Flynn’s hip, covering his Beretta. Meshing her body into his, she angles them backward to the point it feels she might topple the both of them right off their bar stools. Koko’s hand leaves Flynn’s crotch and slides around to the holster on his hip.

  No matter what, if this is a go Koko sure as hell is going to have two guns.

  Koko cracks an eyelid and takes in warped reflections in the bar’s decorative chrome. Slowly and clockwise, she shifts both of their bodies around on their stools.

  Focus, Koko.

  Imbedded ocular. Find it.

  More funhouse reflections turning in the bar’s chrome and glass.

  Turn, turn.

  Koko thinks she sees the shoulders and head of someone moving away—short hair and built, but she can’t be sure. From the back she knows there’s no visible proof of an imbedded ocular, as even the most archaic devices lay close to flat against the skull.

  Was it the woman Flynn said he saw? Hard to say, but it definitely is not that redhead with the neckbands. Aw, hell. Koko asks herself what she’s still doing here. She needs to move.

  Koko breaks off their kiss. As she tries to slither away from Flynn, to her surprise she discovers Flynn is now holding fast to the flesh of her ass. Koko has to clear her throat to get his attention.

  Flynn opens his eyes.

  “Wowza.”

  Koko reaches around her back and pushes down on his arms until he lets go.

  “Hey, Flynn?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You don’t by any chance live close by, do you?”

  Flynn raises a hand for the check.

  A MU WITH A VIEW

  This is going to be so easy, Mu thinks.

  Look at these two. Arm in arm, not a shred of care in the world. Like a couple of lovebirds out for a post-dinner stroll.

  Suckers.

  Mu is totally positive they didn’t make her at the restaurant. A close call, yeah, but luckily she turned around at just the right moment and became another unexceptional head in the Alaungpaya hordes. No, these two have no idea they’re being followed. No idea at all.

  Mu hangs back and allows some of the people along the promenade to buffer the distance between her and her targets. She falls in behind a pack of chatty teens whooping it up, getting their evening party on.

  What the hell? Mu thinks. What is it with this Martstellar?

  A few hours ago she goes all tiger-on-tiger with Heinz and now the woman decides it’s okay to pick up a little man meat for some shift and shake?

  Well, the file did say Martstellar had gone soft. All that oversexed living down on The Sixty. Not to mention the guy she’s with is packing heat. The fat man said she was low on credits. Maybe she’s looking to score another weapon. Whatever. Girl is a total loser, and she’s totally in Mu’s sights.

  Now if only these two would take a small detour. Yeah, that would be choice. Perhaps slip into another bar. Someplace dark. Mu could just sidle up behind them and slit both of their throats with one speedy pull of that blade she took when they killed the fat man. Let both their bodies fall and take their eyes while the life drained from them, maybe take an extra ear each.

  Oh, yeah. That would make things so easy.

  Mu is about to update the others on her location when a personal audio message crashes in via her ocular.

  Oh, who the—Now? Now? Damn it to hell…

  The audio patch is from Mu’s grandmother.

  “Bootsy, dear?”

  Mu attempts to sound upbeat and cheerful as she taps in to respond.

  “Hey, Nana…”

  Mu’s grandmother is ninety-six years of age and has no idea what Mu does now. To be honest, it has been more than a wearisome inconvenience for Mu to conceal her secondary career and new identity from the old woman all these years, but Mu has always been afraid that if her grandmother knew the truth of what she now does for a living or how she’s changed her name it would crush the old woman’s heart. Mu’s grandmother was so proud of her when she played football for the South American Coalition, and after she retired from professional sport
s it thrilled Grandmother no end that she went back to school to pursue a professional degree. Her grandmother actually believes that Mu is now an accountant. A bit of a half-truth. Balancing ledgers for the powerful, only with a quick hand of death, all under her new alias, Loa Mu.

  “I’m not bothering you at the office, am I, dear?”

  Looking over and past the shoulders in front of her, Mu twists through the crowds with her eyes locked on her targets ahead.

  “No, Nana,” Mu says. “You’re not bothering me at all. I’m just, you know, crunching the numbers, your busy little girl as always. Are you all right? Is something wrong?”

  “Well, I hate to trouble you at work,” her grandmother says, “but I’m having trouble with my medical payments again.”

  Mu sighs. “Nana, I think I took care of that.”

  “You did,” Mu’s grandmother says. “Well, you told me you did anyway. But my health axis administrators, they’re saying they never received the credit transfer for my last two treatments.”

  This news pisses Mu off. She’s been handling all the mind-numbing ins and outs associated with her grandmother’s recent medical condition and is certain she received confirmation of receipt of payment for her latest treatments. Why those data-pushing, lazy-ass, little—

  “Did you check your advocacy representative’s records, Nana?”

  “I did,” the old woman answers. “But they said the same thing. They said the credits haven’t shown up in their account silos. Of course, now they won’t let me schedule a time for my follow-up treatments because they say I’m carrying an insufficient balance. I’m very worried, dear. My tumors feel funny.”

  As much as she loves her dear old Nana, Mu doesn’t have time for her reedy prattling. She notes that Martstellar and her armed friend have dropped out of the flow up ahead. Quickly, Mu takes cover behind a three-dimensional advertising hologram shooting upward from the deck. Easing her head incrementally around the hologram’s projection, she sees that Martstellar and her man-panion have stopped to be part of a small crowd waiting for a lift. Both of them look upward as a lift slides down the inner atrium wall to their location.

  Not good, Mu thinks. If those two board that lift she will more than likely lose them. Of course, Mu could just slam aboard the lift at the last moment before the doors close and go all close-quarter on them, but there are almost a dozen additional people waiting with them for a ride. The lift will be brimmed. Yes, Mu isn’t above a little hand-to-hand or smoking a couple of bystanders, but that jerk Lee down at CPB gave specific orders. He stressed discretion.

  Mu has a brilliant idea.

  She taps in. “Oh, I’m sorry you’re not feeling up to snuff, Nana. I’m sure I can get this issue all sorted out, but I’m kind of needed in a meeting right now down the hall. Can I patch you back in a few minutes?”

  “Oh, of course, dear,” her grandmother answers. “I don’t want to cause you any trouble.”

  “No trouble at all,” says Mu. “Just give me fifteen minutes or so and I’ll get back to you straight away, all right?”

  Right, Mu thinks. Right after I kill these two bozos.

  Her grandmother’s tone brightens. “Oh, that would be so helpful. I love you, sweetie. Be a good girl, Bootsy. Smooches!”

  “Smooches to you, Nana. Bye.”

  Mu terminates the patch. Bending her elbow and reaching back, she jerks back a zipper on her rucksack and paws inside, and immediately she finds what she’s looking for: a small translucent bag of microelectronic tracking chips. Edged with miniscule adhesive barbs, each chip is no bigger than a fleck of party confetti. She pinches out one of the chips from the bag and holds it to the side of her skull. The chip beeps softly in response to confirm synchronization with Mu’s ocular frequency.

  Now all Mu needs is a diversion. Something simple that will allow her to get close. Mu remembers she has a sizable amount of credits in her pack, enough to bribe a small army if need be. She opens a second zipper on her pack and takes about half of her credits, figuring half will have to do. After she collects the bounty, hell, she’ll bill the outlay to CPB as a field expense.

  Mu rolls left and around the hologram. She shimmies through the crowds, keeping her face averted, and moves ahead. When she believes she has enough distance, she hurls all the credits into the air behind her like a tossed wedding bouquet.

  The diversion works. Once people on the concourse realize what’s fluttering down all around them, the scene becomes feeding time at the jackal cage. Shrieks and squeals, diving bodies lunging every which way in an all-out scramble of greed. Some people wrestle and even come to blows, and Mu couldn’t be happier when she sees a teenage busker wielding his pipe guitar at people’s heads like a battle axe. She sees Martstellar and her friend get shoved about in the crowd of people waiting for the lift. Mu slips past behind them and hooks back, planting the tracking chip on the tall bearded man’s waist with a passing tap.

  Mu jogs ahead, patting the side of her skull to check the tracking sync on her ocular. A locater beacon echo flashes clear in her field of vision, and she can’t help but pump a victory fist. When enough distance is between her and her targets, Mu finds cover in a shop doorway and catches her breath.

  Pulling up a previously uploaded file of Alaungpaya’s barge architecture and using an overlay, she cross-checks the chip’s location beacon. She sees the transmitting beacon board the lift and power upward. It takes eight minutes longer to assess the final location.

  Deck 20, personal quarters of Flynn, Jedidiah; SFZ Citizen Identification 821612403.

  Pay dirt.

  INTO FLYNN’S

  After a moment of insisting that he enter his quarters ahead of her (no way in hell is she going to have her back to anybody, not even Mr. Nice Guy former lawman with the ass-grabbing hands), the first thing that strikes Koko about Flynn’s quarters is the number of packing crates and recycled cardboard boxes lying about.

  Most of the storage boxes are sealed with clear packing tape and all appear to be labeled in thick black marker for shipment to the same location. Strangely enough, it’s the name of an organization that Koko is somehow familiar with:

  new liberty international relief services (nlirs)

  depressus donation division (d3)—second free zone

  “Charity?” Koko asks, not turning around.

  The unit’s augmented managerial intelligence system senses Flynn’s presence and adjusts the lighting and ambient background noise to suit his predilections. The soft carbonated bubbling of a meditative fountain rises in the background, and Flynn seals the entry’s magnetic locks with a soft click.

  “Just unloading some clutter,” he says.

  Koko puckers her lips.

  Just past a cubby sitting area with a C-shaped settee and foot table is an accordion screen made of synthetic sandalwood and pale, gossamer fabric. The fabric-lined sections are animated, painted with moving abstract shapes, and just beyond the accordion screen Koko spies an unmade full-sized bed with wrinkled black sheets. A series of framed prints are hung on the wall above the bed. Enlarged images of nanometer processing chips in a succession that go from orderly and new to completely scorched and destroyed. Koko has seen the prints before. It’s an antique tongue-in-cheek pop-art series referencing the aggressive stages of the Radix3 electro-virus. Unleashed by an alliance of quasi-political and devout malcontents hundreds of years ago, Radix3 decimated global power grids, obliterated the Internet and wireless spectrums, and initiated Earth’s first foray into small-scale thermonuclear smartwars.

  One of the recycled boxes resting on the foot of the bed isn’t sealed. Koko uses a sharpened fingernail to peel back the flap, leans over, and peeks inside. Neatly folded towels and assorted labeled toiletries. She doesn’t turn to face Flynn, but angles her chin upward to point.

  “Is this the window view you mentioned?”

  Just off the unit’s tiny galley kitchen, Flynn is busy emptying his pockets onto a table planking out from th
e wall. His habit-driven hands unclip his gun holster from the belt around his waist, and he sets it down on the table.

  “It is,” he answers. “Pretty lucky I snagged a bulkhead unit, but like I said in the lift on the way up, I nailed this place on foreclosure a few years back. Sky views on this deck are pretty steep price-wise. If it hadn’t been for the foreclosure, I could’ve never afforded it. Here, let me open the protective shade for you.” Flynn raises his voice slightly to address the unit’s AMI system. “Window. Open, please.”

  With a flat click, the protective housing covering the reinforced window releases and withdraws like a reptile retreating into a hole. Once uncovered, the window is about the length and thickness of Koko’s leg. Koko glances out the narrow window just as one of the bright columns of Alaungpaya’s outer klieg lights slashes through the clouds.

  “Cool.”

  “Well, there’s some stars shining through here and there,” Flynn says. “It’s much better in daylight.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  Flynn puts his hands on the small of his back and stretches. “When Alaungpaya tracks over the poles you really get a good show, particularly entering dawn or leaving any major climate systems. Last year’s triple typhoon that obliterated what’s left of India’s eastern coast? The most amazing sunrises.”

  Koko turns and waits until Flynn looks her in the eye.

  “Listen, Flynn,” she says, “About before… down at the restaurant…”

  “Yeah?”

  “Well, there’s no easy way to say this, but I think that kiss was a mistake.”

  “A mistake?”

  “Yeah. I’m afraid I haven’t been exactly forthcoming with you.”

  “Oh? And how’s that exactly?”

  “Well, for starters I’m not really on holiday from the holidays up here.”

  “You’re not?”

  “No. See, most of what I told you before was true. I mean, I used to do hardcore contractor stuff for real and for a long time, and up until recently I also used to be in the hospitality business too. But I’m not in the hospitality business either. To tell you the truth, I’m not really anything anymore, and now,” Koko’s voice trails off and she blows out a breath, “I’m in a bit of a muddle.”