by Kieran Shea
Flynn hooks his thumbs into his front pockets like a farmer.
“A bit of a muddle?”
“Yeah, and that may be understating matters a bit.”
Flynn looks down at his boots in a thoughtful way and then looks up again.
“Well, as long as we are being candid with each other here, I sort of had a feeling.”
“You did?”
“Yeah. And while we’re tossing around honesty here, I knew something was up. That outburst at the table and even at dinner. You kind of gave the impression that whatever muddle you say you’re in, it’s not good. You’re sort of distracted.”
Koko crosses her arms and cranks a single eyebrow. “Really.”
Flynn shrugs. “Not that that’s a big deal or anything. Like I said, at first I thought it was because you’d lost so many credits at the tables. I mean, who wouldn’t be ticked off by a big loss like that? But then I thought you were just shining me, going from telling me you’re going to kick my butt to being all friendly, waiting for your chance to skip out. Which is fine too, but—”
A bell softly bongs twice behind him. The unit’s AMI system addresses Flynn—a raspy, feminine voice:
Jedidiah. Single visitor present at entry. Female. Do you wish to grant access?
Puzzled, Flynn swings his head to look at the unit’s door and then turns back to Koko. The expression on Koko’s face and her now-drawn weapon say it all.
Holy shit. Where’d that come from?
Koko vaults sideways and takes cover on the opposite side of Flynn’s unmade bed. Crouching down, she levels her weapon past Flynn’s hip and directly at the door behind him. The indicators on Koko’s gun glare red like the eyes perched on the snout of a demon.
Flynn lunges for his holster on the planking table and spins into the unit’s open bathroom area just as the front door pops with a suppressed whump. The muffled detonation sounds like a large pillow being punched.
Flynn draws back on his footing as a snapping shower of electrical sparks streak inward into his quarters. Sliding down the bathroom’s doorway, he pulls his Beretta and discovers the safety has already been released.
What the—
He flashes back on Koko’s sudden kiss at the bar.
Oh, that’s just perfect.
Flynn smears a forearm across his forehead and curses himself for being so stupid just as a body rushes past him. The AMI system announces the alarm. “Intrusion, Jedidiah. Intrusion.”
Flynn looks across the room and sees Koko and a second woman grappling. The second woman is shorter than Koko, forged in muscle, and has a gun. Each grips the other’s gun hand while her second hand attempts to execute attack strikes. The sound of flesh smacking flesh without pause or pity is sharp and quick.
The intruder reaches behind her back and withdraws a hidden blade. As the blade snicks open, the intruder whirls it around toward Koko’s side. Koko anticipates the stick, arching her body. The intruder’s knife misses Koko by a mere fraction, and to Flynn it doesn’t seem real. Koko bends her body in such an impossible angle, it’s as though she’s made of rubber.
Whipping her head around and down, Koko seizes her attacker’s knife hand in her front teeth and rips away a small sheet of flesh. The woman drops the knife instantly, but astoundingly she does not scream.
The AMI system continues: “Jedidiah? Intrusion and smoke detected within quarters. Repeat, smoke detected within quarters. Are you safe, Jedidiah? Ten seconds before alarm engagement and security notification.”
Flynn falters and panics. He doesn’t know what to do. He wants to squeeze off a round to at least clip the intruder, but he can’t get a bead on Koko alone, and he fears he’ll end up shooting them both. As the two women continue to thrash violently around, Flynn gets to his feet and sidesteps from the bathroom to the kitchen area. He keeps his gun up and his sights trained and hopes for a break, but it doesn’t come. The two women’s moves are so fast, so blinding, it’s almost as though the two are one blurred animal. A fusion of unstoppable limbs.
The assailant lifts a leg and stomps on Koko’s instep, and Koko throws her head back and roars. Reeling around, Koko claws a hand down and across the woman’s face and gouges four precise, deep grooves. Koko’s follow-through screws her free, and she backhands the side of her weapon across her attacker’s forehead. On sickening impact, the woman tilts for a second, and Koko plants the barrel of her gun into the woman’s side. Koko pulls the trigger.
The muted blue whelp pierces the intruder just under her kidney, swelling and lifting the woman clean off her feet and onto Flynn’s bed. The heated energy of the discharged round roams inside the woman’s body like a monstrous, squirming creature seeking an exit, and a split second later a chunky, wet, cough-like pop renders the assailant messily across the bed.
Something wet and hot splashes on Flynn’s face, and he knows it is showering viscera. Bits and pieces of the intruder have painted his quarters like a ruptured can of bright red tomatoes, and the exiting round has vaporized the entire right side of the dead woman’s body.
“Jedidiah? Alarm and security notification imminent. Five seconds to reply.”
Koko staggers backward. “Turn it off!”
Three seconds before alarm and security notification.
“Flynn!”
Flynn stammers past the hard ache in his throat. “Clear! Do not engage alarm! Repeat! Do not engage alarm!”
The AMI system’s voice waits a beat. The meditation fountain trickles in the background, and sparks from the blown-in front door fizzle on the floor.
Alarm engagement deactivated.
A heaving, blood-soaked creature, Koko crashes back against the far wall near the window and swings her gun back toward the door and then over at Flynn standing in the kitchen with his raised Beretta.
A dribble of the intruder’s blood winds into the corner of Flynn’s mouth, and instantly he feels sick. With a loud retch, Flynn twirls about and brings up all the dissolving medications, beauty, seltzer, sake, and food in his belly into the sink. When Flynn finishes puking, he wipes the vomit from his mouth and turns. Koko is on him. She throws a power cross across his chin, and Flynn splashes to the floor.
When Flynn comes to he’s not sure how long he’s been unconscious. Possibly five seconds, possibly five hours. When he rolls over and looks up, Koko is pointing his Beretta and her own gun down at his face.
“I guess I owe you an explanation,” Koko says.
WELL, GEE, THIS IS AWKWARD
With most of the gore swabbed off with a few purple towels dampened in the kitchen sink, Koko strips out of her bloody jacket and bodysuit and shucks them aside. She steps into and tugs on an old canvas jumper Flynn has pulled from one of the packing boxes marked for donation. The jumper is more than a little roomy on her so she cuffs the fabric around her boots and squares off the sleeves high on her biceps. Settling the zipper of the canvas jumper a few inches above the middle of her breasts, she locks the zipper off with a twist. Flynn offers her one of his smallest belts and she cinches it around her waist. She clips Flynn’s gun in its holster and her own holster to the belt and holds the Sig in her right hand.
Now fully sober and changed into fresh clothes himself, Flynn needs all of his fogged-up mental capacities to process the insanity of her tale so far.
“So, there’s got to be others,” Koko says. “If I were going to deploy a team up here and try to keep it quiet on a Second Free Zone barge as big as Alaungpaya I’d send a minimum of three, maybe five. Enough to take care of business, but not enough to rustle up too much attention. Best bet is they’ve already found my room over at Wonderwall and the second team is holed up there, waiting for an update from this one. Price on my head, they may or may not have agreed to check in with each other—as I imagine Delacompte has put a load of credits in play. One thing’s for sure, though: This woman is definitely not the agent I boxed down earlier. Damn, not taking that crazy redhead out was a big mistake.”
F
lynn rubs his aching jaw and withers. “This redhead… she wouldn’t happen to be wearing neck extension bands, would she?”
“Why? You’ve seen her?”
Flynn sighs. “Never mind…”
Rummaging through the open box at the foot of the bed, Flynn finds a small kit containing first-aid supplies. In the kit, wedged up against some antiseptic bandages and tape, he locates an adrenaline-sustainer capsule the size of a caterpillar’s chrysalis and offers it out to Koko like a little boy sharing a discovery. Koko pinches the capsule from his outstretched palm and jabs the sustainer into her neck. The needle discharges its adrenaline with a deflating buzz, and Koko tosses the spent capsule to the floor.
“Thanks. I guess I should thank my lucky stars I’m no longer in the presence of an actual, licensed Alaungpayan lawman, huh?”
“God, what did you do that’s so bad someone would illegally send a couple of cold-blooded killers after you?”
“Would you believe it’s because I helped her out of a tight spot in Finland?”
“Huh? A tight spot in Finland? What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“I really don’t have time to elaborate. And right now it’s probably better if you don’t know, because I sure as hell wish I could forget.” Koko picks up the intruder’s knife from where it dropped to the floor earlier. “Hey, wait a second. I know this knife. This knife is just like the one I got from…” Koko’s face angles off with the revelation. “Oh, no. Juke.”
“Juke? Who the heck is Juke?”
“Do I have to connect all the dots for you, Flynn? C’mon, you’re going to tell me you security go-getters aren’t wise to a fat man aboard who runs a hobby-game-maintenance front?”
“There’s a lot of hobby-game-maintenance vendors on Alaungpaya.”
“Well, let’s just say this particular chubby little hugger sidelines. Juke used to sell black-market weapons down below years ago, but a pissed-off customer sort of took his legs.”
Flynn puffs out his cheeks and shakes his head. “Goddamn.” He recalls overhearing something about an arms trafficking investigation a while back, but since he wasn’t part of the investigation he never gave it a second thought. Flynn crosses down the hallway and starts to insert the unit’s blown-in door back into its housing.
Koko gestures to the boxes marked for donation.
“So, I guess you were going to Embrace, huh?”
Flynn leans a shoulder into the entry door and pops it back onto its track. The door holds in a makeshift way, and when he turns around he half expects Koko to have her gun pointed at him again. Instead he sees Koko picking through the sticky corpse on the bed.
From a zippered crease on the dead woman’s sleeve, Koko removes a credentials plug. She stabs the plug into the wall processor above the right side of Flynn’s bed, and a yellowish holographic slab of light projects out of the wall and rotates between them. Koko passes her fingers through the light’s display but the cues don’t respond.
“Do you mind unlocking this thing?”
Flynn looks up and addresses the unit’s AMI system. “Visitor system access, please.”
Visitor access granted.
Koko opens the files in the gyratory beam and blandly scours the information. “Loa Mu. Took part in the West African civil war takeovers,” she says matter-of-factly. “Operation Buzzsaw. Operation Happy Safari. Usual de-civ merc cycles and typical conglomerate rebuild shakedowns. Hmm. Did a major stint on the Antarctic pontoon drilling settlements. Ooh, impressive body counts on that one. Yadda, yadda, yadda…” Koko looks over and studies the dead woman’s face. “Hang on a second…”
“What?”
“No way. It couldn’t be.” Koko address the AMI system. “Please retrieve all files for soccer World Cup league standings.”
“The World Cup?”
“Shhh.” Koko pulls up a mass of data in the beam, team rosters and photos, and looks over a waterfall of statistics. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d say this girl is a dead ringer for that fullback on the South American Coalition team, Bootsy Starr.” A video of highlights from several soccer matches streams with a hushed audio of cheers. “Hey, you follow the bread and circus much?”
Flynn’s eyes dart to the players running around multi-decked fields gyrating in the projection.
“Only to bet on the occasional over or under,” he says vaguely.
“Oh yeah? Best game ever invented. Whoa, I’m telling you, there’s such an uncanny resemblance. See? That’s Bootsy Starr right there. Look at that girl run. Of course, the names don’t match, but that doesn’t mean anything. Aliases are easy to spin, and maybe she’s had some work done on her cheekbones and nose.”
“How does a soccer player get into private bounty-hunting work?”
“That’s just it. They can’t. All corporate mercs are supposed to be bred-engineered.”
“And bio-engineered competitors were banned years ago.”
“Precisely.”
Flynn watches the beam as Koko keeps sorting through the data. A minute later she wrinkles her nose and shuts down the hologram. She ejects the credentials plug from the wall, tosses the device onto the dead woman’s body. Wiggles her gun.
“So, you. All these boxes all packed up for donation. You’re checking out with the big decision, then?”
“I’m afraid this is the case.”
“So what the hell was all that down at the casino and at dinner, huh? Some pre-suicide revelry and last-breath largesse? Or was it an attempt to rock a little shift and shake as a last hurrah before you offed yourself?”
Flynn objects avidly. “No! That’s not it at all. I was, I mean, we were just talking. We were just having a good time. I was down in the casino because I was bored and figured I’d try to go out on a high note, you know? And I really did win big tonight and swear I was planning on giving my winnings away. Anyway, you’re the one who made a pass at me, if I remember correctly. You’re the one who asked if I lived nearby.”
“Don’t flatter yourself,” Koko says. “I thought you made a second agent in the window of the restaurant. Boy, I’ll tell you, that threw me for a loop. I thought it might be best to lay low for a while. So us coming back here to your quarters? I was just using you as a shield.”
“Gee, thanks for that.”
“Hey, if it makes you feel any better, you’re not that bad of a kisser. Maybe hung a little smaller than I usually like, but I’m sure you make up for it with scads of charisma, what with your fancy bachelor-pad view and all.”
“Now you’re just being mean.”
“So, tell me. Is Depressus really that bad?”
“Yeah. It really is that bad.”
“I’m sorry for your troubles.”
“Spare me your patronizing concern.”
“Oh, and I’m the one accused of being mean?”
“They say the odds are getting better on convalescence and life extensions,” Flynn says, “but like everybody else I guess I was in denial from the get-go, hoping they’d come up with a miracle cure. The drugs are getting better, but the pharmacology keeps changing. I was good for a while, but then you get to this point of no return where you’re not sure of yourself and everything closes in like a heavy curtain. Caring about yourself or anything else doesn’t even enter the equation. You take more drugs just to stave off the mood swings and keep the darkest thoughts at bay, and they say that’s the tipping point. Now, with the second and third generations afflicted up here, some theorize Depressus is gripping the genomes and getting passed down. But like I said, I’m an engineered birth like you, so who knows about the genome thing.”
Koko has stopped listening. She looks down disgustedly at the corpse spread out on the bed.
“God, the head is still on this one. Do you mind?”
“Mind what?”
Koko takes one of the purple towels and wipes the face of the dead intruder. In one swift motion she dips her head and chomps on the corpse’s skull. She bites out the wom
an’s eye with a squishy shred of flesh.
Flynn’s stomach backflips and he dry-heaves. Koko bolts upright and spits the eyeball out in a streaming arc. The eye wetly smacks the floor and tumbles to a rest beneath the love settee.
“Rules of hand-to-hand engagement,” Koko says. “Sorry.”
Another wambling roll in Flynn’s belly. “God! How can you do that?”
Koko inspects the damp purple towel for a clean spot and then wipes her mouth and tongue. Buffs her front teeth with vigor.
“How can you kill yourself?” she counters.
“That’s Depressus. That’s different.”
“Not to me it’s not. If you ask me, a bunch of mopey whiners doing a lemming dive off a sky barge beats battle-marking any ol’ day.”
“Listen, Koko…”
“Hey, I’m sure I don’t really understand what you’ve been through, and I’d love to hear more about your sob story because you’ve really done me a solid here, not accidentally shooting me and giving me new duds and all. But you have to understand, Flynn. I’m out of here. I’m not going to finish out my life being hunted, and I’m damn sure not going to be taken down by a bunch of credit-grubbing killers out for an easy payday.” Koko inhales tightly. “I need to get off Alaungpaya, like, now. Like yesterday. Out of the Second Free Zone orbits completely. Back down to Earth.”
“I think Alaungpaya is already on lockdown until after Embrace.”
“What? That’s already happened? Shit, when does Embrace go off?”
Flynn addresses the unit’s AMI system once more. “How much time until the Embrace ceremony on Alaungpaya?”
Embrace countdown is now at one hour, thirty-two minutes, and twenty-three seconds.
“There you go,” Flynn says.
Koko looks down and fiddles with the gun in her hand. Flynn watches her, and suddenly his chest feels very, very heavy.
“So, I suppose you’re just going to kill me now, right? Tie up a loose end?”
Koko looks up. “I’d rather not, but I think it’d be more convenient.”