Koko Takes a Holiday

by Kieran Shea

  “What about—”

  “The father?” Koko sniffs and clears her throat with a couple of shallow coughs. “She didn’t say, and I didn’t ask or even care. I’m not saying I’m proud of what I did, but when she was through with giving me her excuses I told her I had her back. I made a promise, you know? No more questions, no judgments. I just bucked up and powered through. I put my trust in the mercenary code—thinking, hell, it was understood, right? I thought that’s what friends are supposed to do for each other when they’re up against a wall.”

  “Covering up an infanticide can’t be high on anyone’s list of favors.”

  Koko knocks his hand from her shoulder. “You bastard! You think that was easy for me?” Koko glares at Flynn before shaking her head. “I guess part of me didn’t want to believe it’d happened. I didn’t want to know Delacompte wasn’t the person I thought she was. This screwed-up world is hard enough, but when people you look up to let you down by being weak, vain, and stupid, I don’t know, you start to lose your bearings and the entire sham stares you right in the face. You fray apart. At least that’s what I felt back then, and I couldn’t live like that. So, I did what I had to do, got through it, and tried my best to forget the whole mess even happened. Anyway, that’s what went down in Finland. So, fast-forward a couple of years. Delacompte ends up in an oversight position on The Sixty, and I’m blown completely away when she reaches out to me. She goes on and on and tells me she wants to set me up carte blanche with my own bar. At the time I was feeling pretty ragged out from all the syndicate work I’d been assigned, and I said yes even though deep down I knew something didn’t feel right. Stupid, right? But a job like that on The Sixty Islands? Delacompte positioned the opportunity as a way for me to retire from the gun-for-hire lifestyle with reasonable comfort. What was I supposed to do? Hell, I’m not getting any younger and a chance like that doesn’t come by every day for someone like me.”

  “So it was a payoff.”

  “Maybe initially, I guess so. I don’t know.”

  “And now all of this is about some kind of a cover-up? But why? You’ve kept quiet all this time and you helped her. She’s the one who hired you.”

  “Are you familiar with New One Roman Church of the Most Holy Liberator?”

  “The fundamentalist extremists? Sure, of course, who isn’t?”

  “Every big-shot board executive at CPB is a member, and it’s no mystery that Delacompte has set her sights on a top slot. Shit, the CPB do extensive background checks and interviews at the senior board level—”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning sooner or later they’d probably call me in because they know I was Delacompte’s hire. I’m the only one who knows what she did, and if the CPB ever gets wind she killed her own baby to keep her stupid career on track, she’s done for. The one thing the Church can’t turn a blind eye to is the taking of a life before it’s even had a chance to corrupt itself.”

  “This is crazy.”

  “You want stone crazy? How’s this for a chaser. Delacompte’s had selective memory treatments.”

  Flynn’s eyes just about double in size. “Don’t tell me she doesn’t even remember what happened.”

  “Nope. Like I said, I should have known something was screwy right then and there when she sweet-talked me with her recruitment spiel and told me she’d undergone SMTs. And she might claim she’s found religion, but that’s a crock too. Delacompte is about as likely to be grounded in the holy word of God as I am to go down without a fight. All this? This is about climbing the corporate ladder for her, nothing more. This is about saving her own butt.”

  “But the SMT therapy. Why is she after you if she can’t even remember you were there?”

  “Maybe she filed away an order to get rid of me at a later date. I mean, it is possible. Delacompte is a buttoned-up sort when it comes to logistics. But what really ticks me off is I was right under her thumb all this time, working on The Sixty. Whether she can remember the whats or whys of what went down back in Finland doesn’t even matter. I think the woman bided her time until she could pick her shot and take me out.”

  “I can’t believe this.”

  “Believe it. Holy smokes, Flynn, have you any idea what CPB board members even make?”

  “I guess it’s a lot.”

  “Think of an obscene number of credits and then cube it.”

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Say nothing, but now you know.”

  Flynn holds Koko’s eyes for a few seconds and then looks away. He tries to digest and shut away the information she has just shared with him, the folly and ghastly revulsion of it all, but he simply can’t. The frame of the nightmare is beyond comprehension. He feels washed out and weary, hollow to the bone. Koko squeezes his arm.

  “Hey, are you okay?”

  Flynn shakes her off. “No! I’m not okay!”

  “This isn’t your problem, Flynn.”

  Flynn scoffs. “Don’t tell me this isn’t my problem. Am I not standing here? Hello! We’ve hijacked a septic vessel. What did Jot call us? Sky pirates? I’m supposed to be fish food right now, but no, now I’m a terrorist and I’m trapped above the Pacific with a former mercenary who has the nerve to tell me this is not my problem. This can’t be happening. We’ve got to figure another way out of this.”

  Koko shakes her head. “Ever since I ran into the first bounty agent and let her live I think I’ve been in denial, Flynn. Yeah, at first I thought maybe, just maybe, if I went to ground I could finagle a way clear. But I know now that’s not even remotely possible. Now I’m warmed up and I’m mad. There isn’t any other way out of this but to take the fight straight to Delacompte. We may end up killing each other in the end, but I think I can live with that. Given my hand in cleaning up her mess back then like I did, I guess I might even deserve it.”

  Koko puffs out her cheeks and drags a hand over her face as though to clear her thoughts. Flynn finds her eyes again.

  “But there’s still time,” he insists. “We could turn this frigate around. I don’t know—maybe make a run for it. The Australian territories can’t be that far away now.”

  “No thanks. Too many memories in Oz for me.”

  “Fine. What about New Zealand, then?”

  Koko jeers bitterly, “The Kiwis? God, Flynn, the Kiwis are so depressing since the commonwealth crashed and the syndicates snapped up their natural resource rights. Auckland is like an open gangrenous wound, and the south island strip mines are overrun with insurgent Maori de-civs.”

  “But there has to be some other option.”

  “Look, I appreciate your concern. Really, I do. After all, you’ve done a bang-up job getting me this far.”

  Flynn palms his hands together, pleading. “But what if you just out Delacompte to the CPB and their church? Skip this grudge nonsense you think you’re due and come clean on the whole mess? You could blow the whistle and all of this could just dry up. The CPB might even offer you clemency and consider it all extenuating circumstances.”

  “An accessory to an infanticide? Yeah, right. Those CPB sons of bitches are hardly going to take that lightly.”

  “You’re not the one who started this.”

  “Doesn’t matter. No, I’ve thought about it and there’s no other way. Delacompte has to go, and she’s going out on my terms.” Koko takes a step and raises her voice. “Hey, Jot? Hoon? You guys can unplug your ears now.”

  The pilots lower their hands. Hoon disengages the autopilot.

  “How much longer until we reach The Sixty?” Koko asks.

  “Not long,” Hoon says. “One hour fifteen minutes, give or take. We have pretty strong headwinds on the nose.”

  “Push her if you can.”

  Flynn trolls for a small flicker of give in Koko’s eyes, but the determination cemented in them tells him there’s no talking her out of her decision. Frustrated and exhausted, Flynn slides down to the cabin floor and draws his knees to his chest. He looks up. />
  “You’re something else, you know that?”

  Koko stares out the bow bubble and cracks her knuckles. Clouds rush past in a tunneling gauntlet. Her eyes fork hard into the distance. Cold.

  “I’ll take that as a compliment,” she says.

  WELCOMING PARTY

  Delacompte commandeers a terra-sled from the SI transport pool and streaks toward the landing fields on the southernmost dot of The Sixty Islands chain. Pushing the throttle to maximum velocity on the access roads, she whip-steers in and out of resort and maintenance traffic like a missile hot on target, her trajectory a mere meter off the ground.

  Delacompte hums past the simulated killing lagoons. Hurls past the open, burning blight of the Trauma Quadrant. Over the bridges and past adrenaline-pumped vacationers writhing in outdoor orgies of simulated butchery and lust. SI flight control in the main tower patches in on the terra-sled’s com, and Delacompte demands an update on the septic ship’s estimated time of arrival.

  “Inbound G-Class in twenty-two minutes. Biohazard de-rack team dispatched. G-Class queued for touchdown on runway nine.”

  “To whom am I speaking?”

  “This is Flight Administrator Bardsley. Identification number 2245—”

  God, she didn’t want this jerk’s entire life story.

  “Listen, Bardsley,” Delacompte says, “I told you guys to eighty-six the biohazard de-rack.”

  The com clips silent.

  “Come again, Vice President Delacompte. Not sure I got that.”

  “Did you guys kill the de-rack on runway nine or not?”

  “Uh, the biohazard de-rack teams are already on the ground and setting up in the hangar for arrival and transport.”

  Delacompte banks the terra-sled, and the road opens up on a vacant straightaway. Hemmed in by the jungles zipping by, she flies parallel to the drainage ditches feeding into the archipelago’s conservation scuppers, petals and leaves twirling in her wake. Like popcorn in a skillet, insects snap and pop against the terra-sled’s triangular windscreen. Pleased not to see another vehicle on the straightaway for at least two kilometers, Delacompte redlines the controls.

  “You people are worthless,” Delacompte says. “I want the hangar perimeter and runway area completely vacated. If I see any of your de-rack personnel within two thousand meters of that hangar, I’m going to track you down and rip your lungs out through your balloon knot. Got it? Clear it. Clear it now. ETA is one minute plus.”

  “Copy that. De-rack canceled. Perimeter seal orders confirmed.”

  “And don’t do something stupid to give me away. Procedure your hustle to the letter. If this inbound spooks because of something you do or don’t do I’m personally blaming you, Bardsley.”

  “Understood. Have you on visual, outer bands and closing. Um, Vice President Delacompte?”

  “What now?”

  “You might want to slow down.”

  The straightaway in front of her curves abruptly to the left and the thick tropical rainforest peels away. Banking hard into the sudden turn, Delacompte adjusts her weight and barely avoids a head-on collision with a ground shuttle packed with SI tourists.

  Delacompte downshift s, brakes, and nearly spins out of control, but she corrects and regains momentum. An open security gate looms ahead, outgoing transports filing up behind it, and Delacompte gusts through it at one hundred thirty-seven kilometers per hour.

  From above, The Sixty Islands’ aircraft landing fields resemble the front wheel of a massive pennyfarthing bicycle. Twenty kilometers in diameter, the combined runway and servicing apron is rimmed by moats of sloshing, brackish seawater. Once past the outer security gate, Delacompte punches the controls again and follows the airfield circumference around the inner runway beacons. Each of the runways on her right is marked with giant, bright orange numerals illuminated by solarized dynamos underground. When she reaches runway nine, she slows the terra-sled to a floating stop and releases the terra-sled’s hatch.

  The hatch lifts with a muted reptilian hiss, and Delacompte glances toward the morning sky. The rising sun is a massive fireball on the horizon, and she has to shield her eyes from the glare. Idling in the terra-sled, she estimates the air temperature to be over forty-four degrees Celsius. Twenty or thirty more degrees and you could positively poach an egg. Roars of incoming and outgoing aircraft vibrate the gelatinous, moist air.

  Wiping the sweat from her brow, Delacompte recalculates the frigate’s arrival time in her head. Less than eighteen minutes, give or take. Once the ship lands, the rising sun might be an advantage for Koko if they end up engaging in the open, but SOP for inbounds is to taxi to the hangar before disembarking and offload.

  Delacompte knows what she needs to do. She lowers herself back into the terra-sled, seals the hatch, and burns east, streaking up the heavily skid-marked runway.

  Pin Koko in the hangar and have a standoff. A warrior-on-warrior moment of principle and pride in which they agree to set their weapons aside and finish this business with some good old-fashioned hand-to-hand.

  Sure, that might be fun, Delacompte thinks, but a total waste of time. As soon as Koko shows herself, Delacompte is going to make her a grubby stain on the ground. Delacompte can almost smell the stench of fried flesh, and once again she wishes she could remember.

  Why is she doing this again?

  INCOMING

  As the frigate slopes downward, cutting their altitude, Flynn’s inner ears click.

  Jot and Hoon have confessed to delivering to The Sixty before, and now they are locking into the SI’s pattern as flight control confirms and acknowledges their inbound approach. The exchange of technical gibberish sounds normal, and Jot and Hoon don’t say anything that might give away the fact that they have been compromised. Koko hawks their movements just to be sure that everything is on the up-and-up as Flynn rises to his feet.

  “How much longer?” he asks.

  Hoon responds with a sniff, rubbing the bruise on her neck. “They have us locked in for runway nine,” she answers. “We should see the primary navigation beacons in a few minutes. Port side, ten o’clock. Then we’ll turn a bit, and when we level off they will be directly in front of us. Traffic is pretty heavy down there this time of day, but it’s mostly personnel transports and private commercial crafts on lower paths. Anyway, they kind of give operators like us a wide berth.”

  “I can imagine,” says Flynn.

  Jot smirks. “No one ever wants to see or even smell revolting business such as ours. Takes away the pricey resort charm.”

  Beneath them, the landing gear lowers with thumps from its locked, recessed position. Koko moves forward and grips the back of Jot’s seat, and Flynn does the same with Hoon’s. They both dip their heads a bit to see out the bow windows. Stretching out in a dappled, corduroy azure, the semi-toxic cyan seas churn.

  Hoon points. “There!”

  Flynn sees it, and the grandeur of The Sixty is amazing. The landmasses look just like the advertisements he’s seen on the feeds, a perfected lush hoop of manufactured tropical islands, complete with artificial stratovolcanic spines. A trick of the morning’s parting clouds and the sun’s light behind them, the low jungle hills glow greenish gold. While Flynn hasn’t much experience with terrestrial vegetation, he thinks the light might be the kind one sees in turned tree leaves before a terrible storm. Seems fitting, Flynn thinks, in any case.

  Koko: a one-woman whirlwind.

  “Turning,” Hoon announces, working the rudder and flap controls. “Decreasing air speed…”

  “I have her now,” Jot responds. “Flight level forty-two hundred meters. Prepare for landing and arrival. You two will have to hold on back there, as there are no safety harnesses or jump seats for you. Try not to get in the way, yes-yes?”

  Hoon busies herself with quick fingers swiping across various screens and projections. The ship’s altitude continues to decrease.

  “Pretty smooth flying, Jot,” Koko says. “I guess you’ve logged a lot of
hours hauling solid waste around. I mean, what with your advanced age and all.”

  Jot’s red wool cap is soaked dark with sweat. “Almost two hundred twenty-five thousand hours. I may be an old man, but I am a very good pilot. After our miserable takeoff from Alaungpaya, anything close to normal will seem smooth.”

  “What happened back on Alaungpaya anyway?” Hoon asks.

  Flynn places a hand on Hoon’s shoulder.

  “We almost didn’t make it. We flew through the Embrace jump.”

  “We what? We flew through Embrace? But I thought the whole place was in emergency sequence and they were depressurizing. They still went ahead with the ceremony?”

  “Apparently the afflicted couldn’t wait for the all-clear and took matters into their own hands.”

  “Whoa, that’s really messed up.”

  “You’re telling me.”

  Hoon’s eyes flicker across the projections slipping and shuffling in front of her. From the change in her expression it grows apparent that something isn’t quite copasetic. Her brow pleats.

  “Hey, Jot? Are you seeing what I’m seeing here?”

  All heads turn to Hoon.

  “Look.”

  Jot examines the projections, but doesn’t grasp what Hoon is referencing. Hoon heaves a small sigh and addresses Koko and Flynn. “Normally, this far out we get a personnel file grid listing all service marshals who’ll be overseeing the biohazard de-rack. It’s for our flight records. But we haven’t received one.”

  “Meaning what exactly?” Flynn asks.

  Hoon swipes a panel away and reviews a second avionic projection with a squint. “Meaning it’s just odd, is all. We’re in their queue, and it’s possible they might have forgotten it, but that’s pretty unlikely. These things are programmed directly from the main tower and dumped solid. I don’t know. It’s probably nothing.”

  Flynn squeezes her shoulder. “Hail them.”

  Hoon looks back.

  “You think I should?”