Koko Takes a Holiday (30 page)

Delacompte won’t wait for debark
, she thinks.
No, she will come at me quick and she will come at me hard.
Someplace not entirely unexpected, but certainly from the advantage of cover.

Jot told Koko that the hangars on The Sixty are kept fairly neat. Some cargo bins. A hover lift or two. A couple of caster-based ladders with retractable boarding gantries for accessing hulls. From what Koko can discern, it looks like Jot was spot on. She counts three caster-based ladders and all three have corrugated cargo bins with bright yellow number nines painted on their foundations. Koko’s eyes roll over alternate possibilities, hoping for a telltale sign, but she knows her old friend too well. Despite her new veneer of corporate proficiency, Delacompte is, at heart, a battlefield-tested warrior and way too smart to screw up that easily.

Koko can see the lower edges of the catwalks with their X-shaped, grated walkways Jot described. Could Delacompte pop her cold and distant from there like a sniper? The option is likely but, then again, if Delacompte wanted to cut Koko down from long range, she probably would have taken her shot by now.

After all, there’s Delacompte’s smug sense of superiority and personal satisfaction to consider. With the level of excruciating mortification the woman is no doubt suffering, Koko knows Delacompte will want Koko to see her own end coming.

Then again
,
I could be wrong.

Maybe she’ll wait until I’m inside the hangar and then drop in hot and blasting.
Hell, if roles were reversed, that’s what Koko would do. Quit all this messing around and be done with the problem already.

The frigate’s nose pulls closer to crossing the hangar’s threshold, and the bone-shivering whine of the engines devours the air. Just over a hundred meters now. If Koko is going to roll out right or left and not be cornered beneath the ship, her time to act is closing fast. But with so much advance exposure, Koko realizes she needs to wait till the very last second. The big landing gear provides good cover, and she is reluctant to let it go.

Like the open maw of a massive oven, the giant building waits. Above her, Jot and Hoon engage the brakes and the ship shudders and slows down. Koko raises her gun.

Now.

The tightened tissue of Delacompte’s thighs aches. She can’t huddle in this crouch much longer.

Delacompte dips the barrel of the Italian prototype and licks her lips. The sonic buzz of the engines whistles high in her ears.

Oh, fucking come on already.

Come on.

“What are you mumbling?” Flynn asks.

Jot nips crabbily back at him. “I am not mumbling. I’m praying for you! I’m praying for your friend, I am praying for us all!”

“Oh.”

“He does that,” Hoon commiserates. Hoon increases the hydraulic pressure on the ship’s brakes. “Good ol’ Jot. Prays on takeoffs. Prays on landings. Prays in flight and during bad weather. Drives me bonkers.”

Flynn looks out the bow window and places a hand on Jot’s shoulder.

“We all might need a little prayer right now,” Flynn says.

“Your blue-haired friend out there is crazy, you know,” snorts Hoon.

“Just be ready when she gives the signal.”

“Oh, sure,” Hoon replies, rolling her eyes. “The signal. And what if she doesn’t give us the signal, huh? What if she gets herself killed? What do we do then? Are you just going to shoot us too?”

Flynn flicks his eyes down at his Beretta in his right hand. Koko gave the Beretta back to him to keep Jot and Hoon in line, but the gun is useless because she removed the weapon’s power chip in the off chance Flynn might have a change of heart and try to stop her or even shoot himself. The gun is now as effective as pointing a box of dried pasta at the two pilots, but Jot and Hoon are clueless.

“Like the woman said,” Flynn says, “nobody needs to die here. Trust me, Koko knows what she’s doing, and this should all be over in a few minutes.”

But even as he assures the two pilots, Flynn’s mind is taken with an awful precognitive vision. A nightmare string of scenarios, actually. What if Hoon is right? What if it all didn’t go as Koko planned? What if Delacompte isn’t even here? Koko might have miscalculated Delacompte’s response; maybe she dispatched a whole army and they are waiting inside the building to kill them outright. What if Koko gets killed first? Flynn pictures Koko being cruelly blazed to the stubs of her boots by pulse fire and he sees himself, Jot, and Hoon being dragged off by SI security. He imagines the pilots’ pleas of innocence going ignored and unanswered. With an abrupt shake of his head, Flynn snaps his concentration back in line.

On his left, Jot carries on in his soft, Hindu-laden tones.

Koko takes off from her position behind the bow wheels and charges for the right side of the hangar.

Flynn sees her clear from beneath, and he orders Jot and Hoon to swing the craft hard around and to port. The pivot is sluggish, and from the cockpit Flynn sees that Koko has successfully closed the distance. Elbow cocked and gun grip parallel to her right ear, she flattens her back flush to the hangar’s outer siding and turns her head just as the heavy flow from the starboard engines pummels her chest. Then, out of the corner of his eye, Flynn sees something terrible.

A black, silver-haired spider descending from above.

Futilely Flynn cries out to warn Koko, but she has already opened up on the falling spider—her marksmanship nothing short of miraculous. Two quick rounds sever the spider’s arm in a grisly pop of meat, and by some far-out marvel of physiological physics the detached arm’s hand holds fast to the weapon still in its clutch. As both the arm and weapon plummet end-over-end toward the ground, the trigger trips and the gun begins to fire. Searing blue streaks slice the air—full-bore, deadly auto.

Flynn’s eyes jump right as Koko dives for cover. She unloads more rapid bursts in mid-air and one of the rounds cleaves the out-of-control weapon from the severed arm before it hits the ground. On impact, the weapon clatters away, and Koko forward-rolls. When she comes up, she aims higher on the spider’s line—her gun spitting rapid blue light.

Jot and Hoon duck as pulse rounds from the out-of-control weapon zoom past the cockpit windows. Jot begs Flynn to tell him this is the signal, but Flynn yells at Jot to wait. Flynn prays that Koko will be out of the way when the frigate finally labors into its final position. He can’t be sure, but Flynn believes the spider has just jumped from the rope.

Jumped?

Holy sh—

The frigate completes the turn.

Damn it, Koko. Do that crazy bitch and get out of the way.

Still crammed beneath the controls, Jot bumps his head on the helm’s cusp and knocks his red wool hat loose. The tight tuber of gray hair on top of his head unravels.

“Did she get her? Did she get her?”

Flynn looks at Jot incredulously and then over at Hoon.

“Get who?”

“Your girl!”

Flynn starts to answer that Koko is not his girl, but his words are eclipsed by a huge explosion.

Even as the shattered ground lifts her off her feet and hurls her ass-over-tit backward, Koko can’t help but admire Portia Delacompte’s aim.

Got to hand it to the woman. A free jump from a rappelling line, one arm completely shot off, and still Delacompte manages to chuck a pulse grenade with pinpoint accuracy?

If Koko lives, she might actually applaud.

When Koko finally crunches to the ground, a whole host of skeletal bones snip clean on impact. Both her collarbones. A chipped ulna. Her right shoulder blade fissured apart in a cracked, inverted V. Bits of broken rock lash through Koko’s clothes like falling daggers and she begins to skid. Her face burns, and Koko fears it may be her own cooking blood.

Her sprawl across the ground is agonizing and endless, but when she finally comes to a rest Koko quickly realizes that the pulse grenade’s blast has knocked her gun free. Blindly, she slaps the ground at her sides, searching.

Given the height, Delacompte’s leap from the rappelling line might have snapped one of her ankles or even knocked her out, but Koko can’t see her to be certain. Even if she is hobbling and missing an arm, if Delacompte manages to roll a second pulse grenade in Koko’s vicinity that will be it. Game over. Koko knows she is supposed to squeeze off a tracer round to signal Jot, Flynn, and Hoon to char-broil Delacompte with an engine hot start, but Koko figures that part of her big plan is in the shitter now.

A shout to her left.

“
Koko!
”

The shouting voice sounds hollow and tinny, as though it has wound its way to Koko’s ears through pools of thick, ringing water. She attempts to roll her head toward the voice, but a poleaxe of unbearable pain sledgehammers her vision white. Stabbing, wracking breaths. Through the drifting smoke, Koko catches a glimpse of something. Someone running toward her.

Oh, God.

No. Not like this.

Delacompte coming to finish her off.

Eat her fucking eye.

As the figure nears, Koko finds herself questioning what she’s seeing. The grayish figure, blurred against the morning sky, bends and picks up something from the ground. From the hazy outline it looks to Koko like her missing gun. The Sig 1-9Z.

Oh great
, Koko thinks.
After all this, the quasi-religious, infanticidal cunt is going to execute me with my new gun? Just perfect.

Koko closes her eyes and waits for the end.

“Koko! Talk to me! Koko! Can you hear me?”

…
Flynn
?

As if from a dream, the figure above her comes into focus. The beard. The sad and sleepy eyes and hangdog face. Koko blinks. It is Flynn. Flynn, staring down at her.

“Can you hear me?”

Battery-flavored slop leaks from the edges of her lips as Koko manages a spellbound smile. With a sprained arm she numbly reaches out to Flynn as he lowers his body to her side. She struggles to hear her own scream.

“
Delacompte!
”

* * *

Flynn’s head jerks up in the direction of the fallen spider. Across the radiating tarmac, the broken doll of Portia Delacompte wrestles with a shoulder holster still strapped to the good side of her body. Delacompte has managed to get herself into a sitting position, and the ugly stump of her left arm pokes out at a bizarre, snapped-branch angle and pumps a ridiculous arc of blood.

Flynn sweeps Koko’s gun across Koko’s field of vision as his other hand rises up to cup the butt in a two-handed grip. Flynn aims, squeezing the trigger just as Delacompte clears her backup Browning 70 sub-compact from the shoulder holster.

All those years of law enforcement, never once discharging his weapon in a tactical situation… Flynn, to his astonishment, doesn’t hesitate. The weapon whelps blue once—then twice. Flynn, the poor, depressed doofus, misses completely.

Flynn’s third shot tags Delacompte on the edge of her squashed pelvis, spinning her backward. It’s like crimson and pink streamers twirling on a maypole, a long section of guts following her around and around until she stops. Delacompte screams, drops her gun, and braces her remaining arm against her stomach.

Flynn looks behind him and up at the cockpit windows just as Hoon and Jot raise their heads. He drags a hand across his throat and shouts at them to shut down the engines, and a moment later the frigate’s engines start to slow and grow quiet.

Flynn rises to his feet. As he plods forward, Delacompte’s face becomes a study of chalky, gore-splattered rage. A widening puddle of blood spreads out around her, and a glistening bulb of intestinal tract gleams in her fingers. Flynn doesn’t relax his aim.

“It’s over, Delacompte,” he says.

A range of confused looks hiccup through Delacompte’s fury. Moaning, she struggles to turn around on her ravaged axis, looking for her dropped weapon.

“This isn’t your fight!” she screams. “This is… this is a CPB security matter. That woman is… she’s… wanted for… f-f-failure—
Fuck! This hurts!
”

Flynn moves closer. “You’re bleeding out.”

Delacompte almost laughs and spits up an alarming wash of blood. “Bleeding out?” she says slushily. “I am not.” She glances down at the open ruins of her stomach and briefly over at her missing limb lying on the ground like a discarded drumstick. “This is nothing,” she says dismissively. “But you. You’re interfering with official CPB directives—I’ll have you executed, I’ll have you sent to a re-civ penal camp, you-you’ll—” Delacompte stops and screams at Flynn with all her might.

It takes a dozen seconds for Delacompte’s tantrum to subside. Flynn hears the distant, approaching sirens of the SI emergency vehicles streaming their way across the landing fields as he inches closer.

“It’s over, Delacompte. I know everything. What you’ve done to Koko. To those poor people up on
Alaungpaya
with your hired thugs, to your own flesh and blood back in Finland.”

Delacompte’s face skews. “My own flesh and
what
?” A large bubble of pink-tinged saliva pops messily on her lips. “I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Of course you don’t,” Flynn says. “Your selective memory treatments took care of that.”

Delacompte’s eyes flutter. “My what? My selective memory treatments? How do you know about my—”

Then it’s as though a great light crashes through Delacompte’s eyes. She shivers with a rattled breath, and her face slackens. Flynn wonders if at last the unbearable demons of her own repressed memories have savaged their way to the surface of her mind. Delacompte teeters woozily for a moment before she flops back. As she rolls her head from side to side in her own blood, an anguished wail unwinds from her throat and slowly becomes a tormented howl. Her remaining hand leaves her stomach and she frantically pats her chest.

Flynn finally sees the pulse grenades on Delacompte’s bandolier.

Oh, shit.