Koko Takes a Holiday (20 page)

It makes Delacompte feel so tired.

You’d think they’d have better things to do than ride fresh applicants like this. She doesn’t know—maybe, instead of engaging directives they have conveniently extrapolated from their pruned ancient scriptures, they could spend their time helping those crushed in the embattled disease- and famine-ridden regions. Perhaps feed the plebeian re-civ minions who actually believe in their revamped, monotheistic mumbo jumbo and huckster platitudes.

But of course not. That would mean work, and who wants to work when you can lie back and roll around in devout fantasy like a pack of overfed dogs?

Really, the reinvention and resurgence of organized religions across the globe after centuries of human-made sub-apocalyptic cataclysm defies logic. Take the best of the world’s bankrupt faiths and cobble them into a unified belief that supports and espouses status and commerce—all of one cast and yet anonymous at the same time, inclusive yet formless. Pure genius in terms of mass control, and no doubt admirable. But after the razing of the planet, after technology’s meltdown and generations of effort patchworking scattered nations’ corrupt power structures back into a tenuous workable engine, after all the suffering, environmental collapse, contagion, war, and moral dearth… don’t you think the Most Holy Liberator—or any deity, for that matter—would have shown up by now? Powered down on some superstar cloud flanked by a bunch of bored-silly angels and said, “Okay, idiots. That’s enough. Knock this shit off right now.”

Doesn’t matter.

Delacompte knows there is no way she is going to move up the CPB corporate ladder without stomaching it all. Every top executive in the managerial echelon of the CPB board wears his or her NORC/MHL faith like a cabalistic badge, and if she is going to continue to the top level she needs to gulp down the fabled garbage whole.

Still, it constantly amazes Delacompte how nobody dares to acknowledge the two-ton elephant decomposing in the corner of the room. Which is, given the secular and violent desires at the core of the Custom Pleasure Bureau’s commercial efforts, the insistence that board-level executives be active in the Church really makes no sense at all.

Talk about compartmentalization.

Delacompte ticks in her salvation identification codes and works her way past the Church’s central mainframe firewalls. Logging in past the gateways takes only a few seconds but the music while waiting is always the worst to her. Country-fried paean hymns and chants moaned by hairless monks living in deep fallout caves in what used to be northern Peru. Like listening to the tone-deaf crooning of humping baboons.

Just get through this
, Delacompte tells herself.
It gets easier every day.

Easier every day.

A greeter welcomes her through the engaged stream. The greeter is a chinless, harsh-looking female with straw-colored hair tightly drawn back; she cuddles an infant in a pale blue blanket like a prop. Usually it’s some feeble old loon jacked high on the Church’s long you can have it all! con, so seeing this woman with her child certainly is a new one. The conviction of fanaticism sparkles in the greeter’s jittery eyes.

“Good news to you, Sister Delacompte! The Liberator welcomes you to the new covenant and blesses you and yours always! The right way and the life!”

Yeah, right
, Delacompte thinks.
You don’t know me, lady. The things I’ve done, the things I am capable of. If you did, I’m sure your head would pop like a blister. The right way and the life? Why don’t you do that kid a favor and smother him while you have the chance?

The thought of the woman smothering the baby wobbles a cold feeling through Delacompte, as though a circuit has been inadvertently tripped inside her. The dim sensation fogs her brain for a few moments before Delacompte forces a tight-lipped smile and nods her head.

“And good news to you, sister,” she replies.

“Are you ready? Is your medallion ready?”

Her medallion—
shit.

Delacompte opens the top drawer in her desk and retrieves an oblong black velvet box. She undoes a brass hook fastening the box closed and removes the plain silver medallion of the faithful. The NORC/MHL medallion is secured to a brown leather lanyard, and she drapes the lanyard over her head. When the medallion is centered against the skin just above her collarbones, an internal mechanism begins to hum quietly like an insect, growing stronger in response to her body heat. Delacompte pushes herself up from her desk chair and strikes a pose mimicking the meek. She turns over her hands and opens her arms.

When she first applied to the Church years before, pharisaic policymakers and archbishops still required kneeling on something hard to increase the presence of pain. Delacompte is grateful they scrapped that primitive part of the daily ritual at least. Now all she has to do is check in, stand there, and wait for the locator currents to lance through her body.

“The service will begin in thirty seconds. Prime yourself, Sister Delacompte. The glory of the right way and the life are with you this day!”

The elapsing pace of the throbbing vibrations in the medallion harmonize with the greeter’s countdown and expand outward in Portia’s muscles with increasing intensity. Delacompte shuts her eyes and tries to focus on something else that will allow her to put herself beyond the dreary hair-shirt discomfort. She hones in on an image of Koko. Koko being hacked to pieces by the blades and gears of indifferent machinery. The mental picture is good; however, thinking of Koko stirs a second wobbly sensation, stimulating the blank voids from her SMT therapy.

Why is she so bent on killing Koko, again?

Forget it, here it comes.

The pain coursing through her body increases in strength, and she has to fight against bucking back and forth on her feet in full seizure lest her organs malfunction. Again, Delacompte compels herself to recall the pixie-like sharpness of Koko’s mercurial features. Her green and quizzical eyes. Delacompte imagines herself holding Koko’s head in between her own two hands and feels her mouth parting on reflex, teeth ready to mark her former comrade blind before she squeezes the spark from her pretty little skull.

Oddly enough, it helps.

Meanwhile, six thousand meters above, Heinz looks at Wire from the bathroom in Koko’s Wonderwall hotel room.

Propped on a single elbow, Wire stretches out on the room’s bed with her rucksack next to her. Suddenly the walls shake as though the barge itself has a bout of indigestive gas.

Wire tenses. “What the hell is that?”

Heinz sighs. “I think
Alaungpaya
is entering a lower altitude. Prep measures for the Embrace ceremony. The service ceilings on these babies are pretty high, and I think they have to descend to a little under four kilometers for the jump. Or so I hear.”

“Crazy bastards.”

“I suppose so.”

Wire flops back and sweeps the sights on her HK across the ceiling.

“This is dumb,” Wire says. “No way is this Martstellar coming back here. I mean, here? To all this? Just look at this place. Not exactly the St. Regis or the Ritz, am I right? Her reserving a room in a dump like this could be a false flag.”

“A false flag?”

“Yeah, a dodge. A false flag. Think about it. Our guest record hack told us Martstellar booked this room, grabbed a shower, got her head together with a couple of drinks, and then split. I don’t know about you, but to me that spells reboot and on the move. Look around—the woman doesn’t even have any frigging gear here.”

Heinz roams her eyes around the room. Hmm. Wire does have a point.

Heinz steps out of the bathroom and checks the window. Parting the blinds, she looks down on the weltering rucks of people on the
Alaungpaya
concourse below.

“Look, we had to check it out,” Heinz says, turning. “Yeah, I get what you’re saying, but this place being that easy might just be Martstellar’s thinking too. She might think we’d see it as a false flag and blow it off too.”

Wire frowns. “Yeah, right. I think we’d be better off covering the arrival and departure areas up top and just trap her there. No way is she sticking around
Alaungpaya
, not after she chose not to finish you off.”

“I told you,” Heinz says, “no passenger transports or personal craft are allowed on or off
Alaungpaya
until after the Embrace ceremony. Your and Mu’s shuttle was the last incoming transport. If Martstellar can’t leave until after Embrace concludes, she might come back here to rest up before she does.”

“Oh, sure. A bounty operative attacks her, she gets some weapons from that chubby paralyzed scumbucket, and she’s just going to come back here to this place? To what? Grab a little shuteye? Holy smokes, Heinz, are you always this obtuse?”

Heinz snaps the blinds closed and steps away from the window.

“Look,” Wire says, “all I’m saying is that this woman used to be a pro. She could have even stowed away on a freighter by now. Might be hiding out on a layover trawler or Helium-3 tanker and biding her time, waiting for the Embrace lockdown to be lifted. I mean, have you even thought of that possibility? It’s not a completely original idea.” Wire ejects the power chip on her HK and rams it home. “From the look on your face I can tell you didn’t even consider that. Whatever, Heinz. You want to bungle this all up, it’s your reputation—not ours. Unlike you, Mu and I have plenty of other assignments in our queues.”

Stung by Wire’s accusation, Heinz watches as Wire taps in on her ocular. Heinz motions to the device with a flick of her hand.

“What gives? Anything from The Sixty?”

Wire shakes her head.

“How about Mu?”

Another shake.

“Huh. You don’t think that maybe Mu might have—”

“Might have what? Done Martstellar all by herself and shafted us out of our end of the bounty? No way. Me and Mu go way back. We racked up ten tours together for the syndicates before we stepped up for the bounty game.”

“Ten tours, huh? Am I supposed to be all impressed by that or something?”

Wire grips her breast. “Oh, suck this, beauty queen. It was a real tight ten. We came up together through the Antarctica outpost campaigns. I mean, have you any idea how hairy that was? Our body counts on those nation-building corpse fields alone peaked past twenty-five hundred each, so why don’t you keep the attitude in check. Anyway, I saved Mu’s ass more than once. That woman owes me.”

“So you trust her.”

“Does anybody trust anyone?”

“No.”

“Exactly my point. Hell, no. But I do know Mu has a weak spot, and believe me, I can always leverage that if and when she ever decides she wants to spin the tables.” Wire shift s. “You know what? To be perfectly honest here, I don’t mind telling you about her Achilles heel because eventually—after we get Martstellar and take her eye?—one of us is probably going to kill you too.”

“What?”

“Oh, don’t stand there and tell me you’re not planning on taking us out for all the reward credits yourself.”

“The thought hadn’t even crossed my mind.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Gee, you should be in a museum.”

“You don’t believe in professional honor?”

Wire throws her head back, hoots at the absurdity of the suggestion. “Professional honor? I suppose you believe in ethical morality and pink unicorns too. Holy smokes, Heinz, this ain’t like we’re back working for the syndicate despots, touting all that ‘mission priority over the individual’ jazz. These days the only thing a girl like me believes in is me.”

Incensed and dumbfounded by Wire’s arrogance, Heinz attempts to regain her composure. Why the conceited, greedy, little—kill her?
Her?
Heinz then makes a promise to herself. Once Koko is eighty-sixed, she vows to rip off both Wire’s and Mu’s heads and take all four of their eyes. Cut off their hands for good measure. Maybe their feet too.

Heinz shakes her shoulders and clears off the rest of her anger.

“So what is this chink in Mu’s armor she’s supposedly hiding?”

Wire chuckles. “Oh, you will positively love this.” Like a teenage girl sharing a secret at a slumber party, she rolls over with an excited grin. “Okay, get this. Mu has a sickly grandmother she dotes on back on Earth.”

“She has a
what
?”

“You heard me. She has a grandmother.”

“Like grandmother as in actual blood-family grandmother?”

“The same.”

“No way. How the hell did Mu ever get past the syndicate military entrance requirements? I thought all operative recruits have to be collective engineered.”

“We do,” Wire says. “But Mu worked some angles. Bribed some programmer or something. In any event, she got her re-civ records falsified. She confessed to me she did it because she didn’t like the prospects of being another low-waging chump once she retired from playing football. In fact, Loa Mu isn’t even Mu’s real name. Her real name is Bootsy Starr.”

“Bootsy Starr?”

“God, Heinz, she played in the World Cup on the South American Coalition. Fullback. Girl has, like, thighs of iron and crazy ball skills. You know how hard it is to get a decent credit-earning job when your glory days on the professional playing fields are over? C’mon, you saw her. She’s not exactly a beauty like you, so once her meager endorsement packages dried up she had no marketable skills whatsoever. Hell, the private military hiring process is all so convoluted Mu knew no one would even care once she proved herself in the field, and she did that in spades.”

Heinz’s eyes flit back and forth as she processes this news.

“Wow. An actual real-life, living grandmother.”

“I mean, how old-fashioned is that?”

“How do you even know this?”

Wire snorts back some snot, spits, and bull’s-eyes a blank feed screen across the room. The phlegm slides down the screen like a pasty slug.

“One night off assignment we both got wicked wasted in some club and she just blathered. I was pretty toasty myself and pretended I didn’t notice or care about what she shared with me, but I sure as hell squirreled that little nugget away for a rainy day. Mu may be a tough soldier, a solid tiger fighter, and a clean shot in a firefight, but she’s also a sneak and a liar. She crosses me, I’ll gut that wrinkly bag of skin of hers like a piece of rotten fruit.”