Koko Takes a Holiday (8 page)

Koko crosses the lobby and one set of two lift doors yawns wide, sensing her presence. As she enters the lift, it takes her all of a half-second to make an anemic-looking dealer painted in the corner like a pale stain. The dealer wears a checkered polyester cowl, and the give and take between them assures them both that they are not enemies. Using some universally accepted sign language, Koko signals for a quarter pouch of crinkle-flake and the dealer’s sleepy eyes drift clear for the transaction. He holds up three fingers as the price. Koko nods and takes out her credits. The dealer takes the credits, and with a smile he hands over a black plastic baggie bundled with a red pig-tail ribbon.

Once upstairs and in her room, Koko is nearly bowled over by the sharp, acrid stink of chlorine disinfectant masked pathetically with a crisp haze of lime. As described on the registration display in the lobby, the view from the room’s smudged window does tunnel down onto the barge’s casino, and, parting the thin blinds, Koko stands still for a moment.

A few hours ago she’d been asleep with Archimedes without a care, and now this. This. On the run and on her own, her confidence shaken. For a moment Koko recalls all her recruitment trips to Melbourne and Perth, when she found Archimedes and the rest of his giddy mates bopping around the discotheques. Those hot nights when she worked him through his boywhore tryouts and found Arch knew how to please a woman in all the right ways.

The stress of her predicament finally starts to catch up with her. She shivers in the chilly recycled air and thinks about The Sixty. Pines for it, actually. All the space, light, and pore-drenching warmth. Images of Archimedes’ blown-apart corpse and her bar aflame rush back, and Koko has to steady herself.

She pushes back the bitterness.

No time to feel sorry for yourself, Koko. No time for thinking like that at all.

Koko inspects the room’s touted mini-bar basket and discovers some rolling skins along with some arousal lubricants, an assortment of tiny bottles of cut-rate alcohol, and a Jacob’s ladder of antibiotic condoms. The package of rolling skins is Second Free Zone micro, cherry-flavored and emblazoned with scrolling advertisements for oxygenized supplements. Koko flips the package and snaps out a couple of papers. Crushing some of her newly purchased crinkle-flake into the skin’s fold, she rolls a tight, sedative smoke to even out her nerves.

She pats her pockets and looks around. Keeping with the lowbrow nature of Wonderwall, no free laser sticks are about to spark her spliff to life, and she hangs her head. Great, more of her crappy luck on the wane.

She rolls a few more smokes for later and drops the unlit spliffs on the night table next to the bed. Then she snatches a couple of bottles of generic beauty from the mini-bar basket and—
crack-crack
—pours the two vials of knockoff booze straight down her throat to avoid the cheap taste. Her esophagus protests the liquor’s burn, but the sudden warmth in her belly helps a bit. Koko kicks off her heavy boots and strips out of the rest of her clothes.

Entering the bathroom, she takes a thin white towel from the rack and takes a good look at her body in the wall mirror behind the sink. Her piercings, the slight cellulite dimples just off the curve of her snugged panties, the tattoo of scrolled flames slashed up and down her inner right arm. Just past a slight sheen of alcohol fat, she still has some of the hammered definition left to her stomach, and she’s grateful her small breasts aren’t losing their youthful lift just yet.

After removing the rings and studs from all her piercings and placing them on the edge of the sink, Koko considers the two major scars on her body: a mottled star on the right side where a rib poked through and a sash of pink tissue on her upper left shoulder. The second scar was her first major wound from action. Caught the full, brunt force of a rebounding mortar pulse on deployment in some godforsaken North African ghetto, back when she was all gung-ho and keen to bring the hammer down on de-civ militants. She can’t recall how or where the rib wound happened or even when. 2510? Or was it 2513? The later year sounds right, but where was it? So much proxy-nation and de-civ craziness the years blur. The rib wound might have happened during a building collapse in Luxembourg, she can’t be sure.

Koko braces herself against the sink.

Delacompte.

Sending an SI security team and now some bounty agent to take her out? What, over some vendor infraction with a couple of vacationing Kongercat re-civs? This has to be some kind of a mistake. It doesn’t make sense.

Standing there, Koko recollects a time when she accidentally met up with Delacompte at an airbase near the last played-out wells of the Samotlor oil fields. At the time, Koko hadn’t shared any duty assignments with Delacompte for a few cycles, and she remembers they were both powering on toward separate syndicate actions: Koko heading to a six-week deployment on lignite resource operations in Aduun Chuluu, and Delacompte locked in on an unclassified government assassination. It was, as they say, just one of those things. A chance crossing of paths on a layover, duly forgettable.

Delacompte claimed her assignment was to be one of her last stints in the field and the hefty payday was more than going to cover her tuition at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques in Paris. What was it Delacompte said she was going to specialize in? Oh yeah, that’s right: restorative consumption patterns. Whatever that meant. Strapped up tight in their BDUs, they were throwing back drinks at the airbase bar when Delacompte shared the news she was planning to pull the plug on her military career.

* * *

“Wow, so Portia Delacompte is giving up the life? Well, I can’t say that I’m totally shocked. Always knew you were headed for something better than the rest of us, Big D. Someplace special.”

“Can’t fight forever,” Delacompte said. “And you and I both know there’s no real future in all this. Think about it. Over the long haul, doing the dirty work on planet restructuring for the corporate masters and their sock-puppet governments? You’ve seen the life-expectancy charts for humps like us. Sooner or later, we all go down. And when we do, we go down ugly.”

“Says the Miss Officer Class here buying the drinks.”

Delacompte frowned. “Don’t give me that shit. Yeah, I’m raking in the officer credits these days, but so fucking what? I’ve earned it. Don’t forget, I’m a lot older than you, Martstellar, and I’ve been lucky too. Sure, you stay with it and quit bucking the systems, maybe you too can get promoted someday, but then what, huh? Answer me that. Trust me, girl, being an officer ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. Just penury of a different color, and me, I want more out of the time I got left.”

“You’re not that old.”

“Cresting thirty-four, babe.”

“Oh, boo-hoo-hoo. You look great.”

“Thanks.” Delacompte stabbed her finger on the top of the bar. “But what about you, huh? Don’t you want something better than this?”

Delacompte’s question made Koko uncomfortable. What was she talking about? More than being a soldier for hire? Honestly, Koko didn’t know. Commercial mercenary work was what Koko had trained for. It’d been her life, her entire world, and she felt she was good at it. Even in her rare free moments of reflection, Koko never truly considered anything other than the next mission that came down the pike or her mind-numbing times off on leave. Yeah, the grind sometimes got her down, but Koko assumed that was just part of being a warrior on call. After all, she was engineered in the third reconstruction collectives. At fifteen she tested average intelligence, but received high marks for stamina and physicality. What else was she supposed to do? Work in some goddamn re-civ manufacturing plant? Be a passive service worker and click off time in an underpaid, trenched existence like an ordinary schmo? No way.

Koko tried to change the subject.

“Well, my hat’s off to you anyway, D,” Koko said. “I mean, if I had a hat. Hey, do tactical helmets count as hats?”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

Koko swallowed an inch of poison from her glass and coughed.

“Which one?”

“Don’t you want more than this?”

“And what? Go to some fancy business school like you?”

“Maybe. Or something else. You’ve got options.”

“Options? Yeah, right. Face facts, D. I’m not as smart as you. Never have been, but I sure as hell wish I was. Like you said before, you’ve been really lucky and you’re older, cranking in that officer-class pay. I’ve always admired you, and maybe someday when I make a decent rank and don’t screw it up I’ll think of something else to do. But for now? Like it or not, this is the life I lead.”

Delacompte picked up her drink. She took a reflective sip and then motioned to a feed monitor above the bar, squinting.

“You know, if you cycled out of your current obligations you could always try your hand at some cage raging.”

Koko looked fuzzily up at the feed screen. The monitor was showing some old highlight footage of TFFI tiger fights with the sound turned down low. Koko grimaced and then spluttered.

“Oh, come off it. Don’t make me laugh…”

“I’m not kidding around,” Delacompte persisted. “You can make some decent credits in those matches, and you’re a natural. Don’t forget, I’ve seen you in close-quarter situations. When those tiger fighters hit it big, some of them make good money.”

Koko drank some more poison. “I’ll pass.”

“Hey, if you want, I know somebody over at TFFI. Guy is a former syndicate merc, just like us. I could patch him and see if he can get you a slot in one of their training programs.”

“Oh, yeah? What guy is this?”

“Former demolition specialist I fucked back in Panjshir.”

“Oh, in Panjshir. When the hell were you in Panjshir?”

“Year back.”

“So this guy? Any good?”

“I think so.”

“You think so?”

Delacompte looks off with mock wistfulness. “Ah, there are so many. I get confused.”

They both broke down laughing.

“Yeah, well,” Koko said, getting control of herself, “thanks for the suggestion, but seriously. No way in hell am I doing some media slut’s version of staged combat just so some loser on credit-view can get off, thank you very much. Besides, that stuff, D? Full-on tiger fighting at the professional level? From what I hear I’d last a day in those fighting pits, tops. Even with their so-called training program, don’t you know those pros love taking out fresh meat like me? I hear they even handicap the matches to weed out the up-and-comers. Probably drop me in a four-on-one bout for my first go-around. Oh, yeah, some big payday that would be. Eye-gouge and body-bag central.”

Delacompte shook her head and set down her drink.

“You know,” Koko said, “now that you’re going all hotshot professional, you’re going to have to play nice on a whole other bunch of fronts.”

“I know…”

“All buttoned up and grounded. No social wilding. Definitely no more sportfucking whoever happens your way in Panjshir. I hate to bring it up, but have you selected your creed yet?”

Delacompte flung back the rest of her drink and winced. “Working on it. Been studying the executive hiring trends, and the monistic approach might be the call. Non-exclusivity leveraging the most job opportunities.”

Koko paused. “Wait. You don’t mean?”

Delacompte nodded. “The New One Roman Church of the Most Holy Liberator.”

“Wow. That’s, uh, that’s—”

An announcement in rolling languages began to bleat overhead, and Delacompte realized her transport was boarding. They both stiffened a bit and said their goodbyes, finishing the rest of their “good running into you” banter with a couple of fist pounds.

After lifting her pack, Delacompte shoved off and was almost to her gate when Koko shouted at her from the bar.

“Hey!”

Delacompte turned.

“I bet I could run a place better than this!”

Delacompte looked around, puzzled.

“Not an airbase, D! A bar! I bet I could run a really great bar!”

Delacompte gave Koko a thumbs up and hit the ramp.

* * *

Yeah, I guess I planted the seed then, didn’t I?
Koko thinks wretchedly. Man, maybe if they hadn’t crossed paths that day Koko wouldn’t be in such a jam now.

But why? Why would Delacompte want to do this to her? Is Koko some sort of liability? She has nothing but veneration and respect for the woman and for what she’s accomplished. After all their time campaigning for the syndicates and multinationals together, after all she has done for Delacompte and—good God—if you consider that night back in—

A light snaps on in Koko’s head.

“Oh, no…” she whispers.

Finland.

No. It can’t be.

No way. It can’t possibly be that simple.
Suddenly, a dark, violent tide of memories starts to seize Koko and her knees weaken. She has to force her mind to go blank lest the recollections overwhelm her.

Why that little… Now?
Now?
After hiring me on The Sixty? Wasn’t it understood? Delacompte is coming after me after all this time has passed? Good God, I saved her from—damn it. Get a hold of yourself, Koko. Even if this is all about what went down back in Finland, no way does whatever happened have any bearing on your present situation. What matters right now is survival. Like it or not, an order has been given and there is a price on your head and you’re in unfamiliar territory. Focus.

Her mind sufficiently seared with the most likely reason for Delacompte’s vendetta, Koko twists the towel and grips both ends of it just above her breasts. Elbows tucked inward and chin down, she steams back into the bedroom and breaks into a series of long-neglected kick drills. Motor patterns riding on drilled but not forgotten reflexes, she teeters a bit as she centers her core and it takes more than a few missed kicks to find her rhythm. Echoes from fight instructors resonate in her memory.

Protect on attack and keep your head clear.

Be alert. Be ready.

Be
balanced.

Fully limbered up, Koko whips the towel onto the bed. Along the wall she sees a power cord trailing from a set of two floor sockets. The cord doesn’t seem critical to the room’s functionality, so Koko yanks it free from its housing and whips the cord over her head for ten minutes of footwork until the balls of her bare feet grow hot. A belch percolates from her lips, and she charges back into the bathroom. Koko retches up the cheap mini-bar beauty along with the last remnants of the drink she bought back on
Hesperus 6
.