Koko Takes a Holiday (26 page)

“Helmsman First Class Hoon.”

“I think you and Hoon should be grateful, seeing as how I just saved your asses from meeting whatever supernatural pachyderm you think is watching out for you. So, tell me, captain. Where were you two headed in this stinky bucket of bolts anyway?”

Jot grumbles and draws up a screened monitor on a retractable arm mount. He punches a few buttons and pulls up the ship’s intended flight plan and then swivels the monitor to face Koko, shoving it in her direction with a repulsed huff. Koko pulls the screen closer and settles back in her seat, her face illuminated by the screen’s yellowish glow.

“One hundred forty-seven east and forty-two south? No way.”

“This was our destination had we not been hijacked by you two savages.”

Flynn finally gets to his feet and sways his way across the cabin. He looks over Koko’s shoulder as she pores over the arrays and motions with his finger to the leaking cut on Koko’s forehead where she slammed into the console earlier. Koko smears the blood up into her blue hair like styling gel and mashes her fingertips on Flynn’s sleeve.

“So what is it?” Flynn asks. “What’s at one hundred forty-seven what-do-you-call-its?”

“A place you may have heard of. Ever heard of Papua New Guinea, Flynn?”

“Papua New Guinea? Yeah, sure, I’ve heard of it. The flooded platform settlements. Nasty place, if I remember correctly. What’s the deal with Papua New Guinea?”

Koko hums happily to herself. “Oh, nothing,” she says. “Just that we’re a couple of lucky hijackers, that’s all.”

Koko unclasps the safety harness. She tilts the screen back, pulls up the navigational inputs, and gets to work. Jot starts to protest but Koko fires him a look like she plans on punching him in the face. Jot glowers straight ahead, and Koko busies herself with the recalibrations.

“New course, captain. A whole ream of extra clicks northwest toward the East Mariana Basin. Micronesia. Damn, I need to pull up the weather scans on this thing.”

Flynn and the pilot both look at Koko and say simultaneously, “Micronesia?”

“No,” Koko answers. “Not precisely. Just north of there and due west of the sub-ocean trenches. It’s a re-stabilized Ring of Fire fault locale. Hey, I trust this ship transmits an identity beacon, right? Cool. They make contact with us, I want you to hail them and ask for an emergency forfeiture and offload.”

The captain tears off his goggles. “Emergency forfeiture and offload? But-but… I will lose my job.” He indicates the unconscious first mate Hoon. “We will both lose our jobs.”

Koko drawls, “Yeah, well, we could just dump you and Hoon out the back and fly this thing ourselves. Horrific death that, just ask my partner in crime here. Hell, he might even join you because he kind of has a hard-on for a big screaming jump—don’t you, lawman? Seeing that you missed your chance back on
Alaungpaya
.”

Flynn shakes his head. Captain Jot looks confused.

“Wait,” Jot says. “You?
You
have Depressus?”

Flynn droops, embarrassed. “It’s kind of a long story.”

Jot reaches across and draws the navigational display’s screen around to his face. After a quick study of the recalibrations and the charts, he peers uneasily over the display at Koko.

“They need a lot of power down there to make the party rev hot,” Koko says. “Trust me, captain. They’ll pick us up and gladly take the vile stuff you got off your hands. My bet is they’ll prioritize our approach on the service runways and shoot us straight to the front of their queue.”

“Uh, so where exactly are we headed?” Flynn asks.

Koko looks at the captain. “Tell him, Jot.”

“We are headed to The Sixty Islands.”

On her feet behind her desk, Portia Delacompte leans on her knuckles and scours the reports on more than a dozen screen prompts projected in front of her.

Concentrating on the prompt displays makes her eyeballs ache. It’s more than challenging to decipher so much fuzzy nonsensical chatter and bulletin analytics. It appears that none of the freelance bounty operatives Lee dispatched to take Koko out have checked in, which leads Delacompte to believe either (a) they are flat-out ignoring her and still hunting Koko down or (b) they are already dead. Instinct and experience tells Delacompte it’s probably the latter. She pats the pocket on her jacket and debates whether to swallow yet another capsule of Q.

C’mon, think, Portia. Think.

From what she can discern, post-explosion on
Alaungpaya
only one vessel cleared the barge orbital before emergency depressurization was finally initiated. This in and of itself isn’t that unusual. Delacompte knows that most service rig and cargo pilots play loose with procedures and ride it a bit cowboy, especially if the rules eat into their delivery deadlines. There could be a dozen different reasons why this particular vessel broke off when the alarm sounded. But it’s truly odd that the vessel flew through a panicked wave of people bypassing Embrace ceremony restrictions.

That ship must have had a good reason to high-tail it out of there.

Delacompte pulls up the flight identification records and notes that the vessel last to clear was a septic G-Class cargo ship on a waste-disposal run to Papua New Guinea. With her security clearance she is able to access the flight plan databases and discovers that, not long after departure, the cargo ship altered its course. Again, a change of flight plan is not all that unusual for freighters, but
holy frigging shit
unusual is the revised destination.

The craft is on a course for The Sixty Islands.

“No, it can’t be…” Delacompte whispers.

Koko.

She’s coming back here? Here? The quarry coming for the hunter?

Well, Delacompte supposes she did
ask
for it.

Delacompte immediately secures a patch to ATC at The Sixty Islands’ main tower. Yes, they have the G-Class vessel from
Alaungpaya
in their pattern and the ship’s ETA before the outer beacons is at forty-five past the hour. She asks if the G-Class has declared an onboard emergency. No, no signs of any trouble other than they left
Alaungpaya
during a required security activation and changed their course intentions. Two crew aboard and eight hundred tons of solid human waste in the hold. Delacompte advises flight that she needs to meet the vessel upon landing, and flight tells her this won’t be a problem. They have the frigate scheduled for biohazard de-rack on runway nine for offload.

“No one but me meets this inbound, understand? That’s a direct order.”

Flight responds. “Um, roger that. But shouldn’t we advise recycle retrieval? We can have four hangar tanks on the pad out there, no problem.”

“No. Extinguish all meet orders.”

“They’re going to squawk.”

“Just do it,” Delacompte says. “No one meets this inbound without my authorization. This is a disciplinary issue for CPB and SI executive management, and I am handling the matter personally.”

Delacompte terminates the ATC patch transmission. She rubs her forehead and then stalks over to her office credenza.

When she presses a button recessed into the paneling at hip-level, the top of the credenza rolls back and the crystal water pitcher and glasses that sat there—flecked with Lee’s blood—crash to the floor. Delacompte gently steps into the spilt water and broken glass.

Letting her fingertips graze from piece to piece, she looks down and drinks in a neat display of guns and close-quarter ammunitions. The weapons are organized from the smallest to the largest. With one hand she picks up a bandolier of pulse grenades, and with her other hand she lifts up the compact stock of an Italian prototype pulse rifle.

“Time to accessorize,” she says.

Delacompte gears up.

The chopped down co-pilot and helmsman Hoon groggily comes to, and Flynn lifts and leads her by the elbow to the co-pilot’s seat. Like a slug stretched beneath the skin, a neat purple bruise the length of Koko’s hand creases the young woman’s neck. She sniffles and stammers a stream of terrified whats and whys—wanting to know what has happened, why they are flying, why they appear to be off course—but Jot gives her an order to be quiet and the girl clams up. Meanwhile, in the rear of the cabin, Flynn studies Koko as she sets both the Sig and his Beretta to the guns’ most powerful discharge settings.

“I don’t get it,” Flynn says. “I mean, the entire world and the Second Free Zone. The whole planet to choose from. Why would you go back to the one place where you know someone is looking to kill you? You could go anywhere, Koko. Anywhere.”

Koko seats both guns on her belt, draws, and snugs them back home again. “I know,” she replies.

“I’m serious. This is totally nuts.”

“You don’t get it,” she says.

“You’re right,” Flynn answers angrily. “I don’t get it. I’m just some pathetic loser who helped save your life and got a bunch of people killed.”

Koko reaches out and pats his arm. “And I thank you for that. Really. Not for getting people killed, but you know what I mean. Look, Flynn, you have to understand. This is who I am. This is how I’ve always dealt with things, or how I used to deal with things, anyway. Me? Be hounded? What, I get to look over my shoulder every day in some far-flung piece of bankrupt supersprawl until someone sells me out and plants a knife in my neck? Uh-uh, no way. I am not signing up for that. Portia Delacompte sent those bounty agents after me up top when the Second Free Zone is supposedly off limits. Just how long do you think I’d survive on Earth with a price on my head? And Portia Delacompte? Ha. Even if she’s painted her actions as some kind of CPB public-relations mop-up or me as a loony SI vendor gone rogue, she won’t stop, Flynn. Not ever. Not when I know her secret and I’m still alive.”

“Yeah,” Flynn says, “her big secret. You weren’t exactly clear on that back on
Alaungpaya
. What the hell is all this about anyway? I’m thinking it’s got to be something pretty heinous for her to risk unleashing those killers. God, there must have been close to a hundred people milling about the terminal when that pulse grenade went off.”

“Maybe it’ll be safer for you if you didn’t know.”

“Safer for me? What, you want me just to move on and
forget
? Those were innocent people, Koko. Innocent civilians going about their lives. You think their lives don’t matter? You know what? Fuck you, Koko. Fuck you. The last time I checked, I’m more than an accomplice here. I think I deserve to know the details of this big, bad Delacompte secret at this point. And anyway, you’ve said it yourself. Me, I’m a dead man. You owe me the consideration.”

Koko looks down at her feet. She takes a few calming breaths before she finally looks up into Flynn’s eyes. She allows another beat to pass between them before she lifts her chin and addresses Jot and Hoon.

“Hey,” Koko says. “You two wingers have headsets?”

Jot and Hoon shake their heads no.

“Stick your fingers in your ears, then.”

Reluctantly, Jot engages the frigate’s autopilot system, and the ship quivers from side to side. Jot and Hoon push their fingers into their ears, and Koko edges closer to speak softly to Flynn.

The years since Delacompte left the mercenary life to pursue her schooling and business aspirations hadn’t exactly been a cakewalk for Koko.

One might say Koko’s once unshakable commitment to anonymously mucking out the stalls on international re-civ stability efforts and buttressing syndicate bottom lines as an expendable asset had reached a critical juncture. That is, she was one more screwed-up assignment or disciplinary action away from burning out altogether.

Finishing up a tedious hitch on the Venezuela mining plateaus for the SA Mineral Corporation, Koko decided it was high time for a well-earned breather to recalibrate her bearings. After her SAMC credit transfer came through, she lit out for an available safe-house compound on the Balearic Islands of the western Mediterranean to reflect on things. True, it was not the safest of locales, but the Portuguese and Spanish bird plagues had played out a few years before, and the largest of the islands, Majorca, where the safe house stood, was a speedy hover hop to the ceaseless, rankled jaws of North Africa for work if her credits wore thin.

Days of sipping warm wine, nibbling salty cheeses, and staring out at the deep-rig, sub-core mining platforms. Loafing in a king-sized bed and recharging her depleted faculties with soft drugs and anonymous, hard sex—it helped alleviate some of her discontentment, but still, it wasn’t enough. After a while, Koko thought that maybe what she really needed to refresh her depleted outlook was a heavy-handed dose of big-sister authoritarianism.

It wasn’t that Koko was overly sentimental or anything. She wasn’t. But she also realized that she didn’t have many real friends in her life. The pressures and responsibilities of her kind of livelihood sort of put the kibosh on those types of personal sentiments. She found herself thinking more and more about Portia Delacompte and their combat bonding.

She hadn’t heard from Delacompte in a while, and it dawned on Koko that perhaps Big D could infuse her with some direction. Delacompte’s confidence and zeal had always seemed to do the trick before, fired her right up and fixed her center. Maybe Delacompte could light the path for her. At the very least, she was sure her old friend wouldn’t spare her a good mental ass kicking.

Cue Koko the sleuth.

Sitting at a long table overlooking the Med in the safe house, she started calling in a bunch of favors with her contacts. Combed intelligence research sources for hours upon hours and stared into archival projection prompts until she felt she was losing her marbles. It seemed Delacompte had become a ghost. No matter where she looked or who she hammered with questions, no trace could be found of the woman. Koko had a sinking feeling that Delacompte had vanished from the Earth. After a week’s worth of frustration, Koko was about to forget the whole deal and take an assignment down in Cameroon, but then an old associate who ran geosynchronous tactical intercepts relayed in a patch to her that Delacompte had taken a top-secret executive position at a leisure finance firm up in Finland.