Koko the Mighty (6 page)

“Hmm, I suspected you might feel that way. But here’s another thing. This Ultimate Sanction status on Martstellar?” Britch beats a glance out the rear window slit of the hovercraft and then turns back. “I’ve checked into this. The order is not exclusive. I can easily leak all this to other hungry bounty agents, if you find my offer so repulsive.”

Wire’s eyes move back and forth.

Shit.

“But what if they scuttle the submarine?”

“Scuttle it?”

“Yeah, did you think of that? If they scuttle the sub and no one ends up finding it, then where would I be with your weaker than spit intel offer?”

“At a solid starting point.”

“I could just beat it out of you.”

Like a deranged crow, Britch cackles. “Oh, really now? How outré. And when would this supposed torment take place exactly? Do you really think you’ll ever set foot on The Sixty again after this monumental bungling of yours? Again, you should’ve read the finer details of your reservation agreement. There are at least five paragraphs covering deportation proceedings with follow-up restrictions. Despite whatever vitriolic judgments you have of me, The Sixty or the CPB, the terms of your deportation includes a fatal consequence clause. If you ever appear again within The Sixty’s confines or even our airspace, make no mistake, this will be acted upon. Expediency is the marrow of my position here, and the choice is now yours. We should be arriving at your transport vessel shortly.”

Wire shakes her head. There is no way in a cold, deep, stinking hell she’s giving this jerk-off fifty thousand credits, not even if it gets her Martstellar’s head on a silver platter tomorrow. True, it’ll probably take her a little more time to locate her and close out the contract, but seriously, is this guy totally out of his mind?

“I think I’ll pass.”

“You’re not interested at all?”

“Nope. Not at all.”

“Oh, I really think you should reconsider.”

Wire lifts her fists and gives Britch the finger—both barrels.

“Eat shit and die, piggy.”

Britch sighs. The hovercraft’s engines whine, and the craft enters a twenty-degree turn. After a long pensive moment, Britch slowly lifts up his right hand as though he’s about to take an oath. Given the back and forth spirit of their talk, the gesture is weirdly atypical, and Wire’s eyes flit briefly to the hand. Seizing her lapse in judgment, Britch quickly leans forward and stabs a pressure syringe with his other hand into Wire’s knee.

Wire heaves back. “GAH! What did you just stick me with?!”

Britch tucks the spent pressure syringe into the breast pocket of his uniform and sits back. “That,” he says, pointing, “is an incentive.”

“A what?”

“A neural toxin. Untraceable, the serum is designed to spread severe damage to all four major lobes of your brain. When the toxin takes full effect it’ll render you into a vegetative state for the rest of your miserable life. You ought to feel the initial effects, well, right about now.”

Wire thrashes against her restraints.

“At first you’ll feel some mild euphoria followed by momentary disorientation, and then an alarming weakening of muscle control along with a heightened body temperature. I’ve an antidote mixed with a powerful sedative that will keep you sedated until you reach Surabaya if you want it.”

“Why you fat, slimy, four-flushing, piece of—”

“I tried to reason with you, but honestly you insist on being stubborn. If you want me to administer the antidote, act quickly and transmit the sum I’ve outlined via this handheld uplink to my private off-world accounts.” Britch pulls his data tab from the sleeve on his belt. “Oh, and don’t forget your flowcode address in the field at the bottom.”

Wire squeezes her eyes shut. As the seconds pass, each sensation Britch just described passes through her body in terrible, creeping curls. The tingling paralysis spreads first, fingers then toes, and then her body temperature skyrockets. Despite her best efforts to remain upright, Wire slumps over in her seat.

“You won’t get away with this.”

“I won’t? Please. I’ll say you got free of your restraints and the use of force was necessary. Perhaps you hit your head as I valiantly subdued you and
voila
! Selective organ harvesting, here we come.”

Wire clenches her teeth. “I am so going to kill you.”

“Look, I don’t get why you’re being so obstinate. Just give me what I want, and I’ll administer the antidote and forward our records along, I promise. Don’t worry. Even a primate specimen like yourself can navigate the rudimentary interface on the data tab screen.” He holds out the device and giggles. “See? All primed and ready to go. Just type in fifty thousand credits in the box marked sum and engage the transfer symbol on the bottom right-hand side.”

Britch tosses the data tab at her and the device lands next to Wire’s head. Awash in misery and half of her vision doubling, Wire barely musters together the coordination to pick the damned data tab up.

Goddamn it all to hell…

As she fixes her swimmy gaze on the screen, beneath Wire’s breastplate walls start to smother her lungs. Looking up at Britch’s dull, insouciant eyes, she has no doubt what the bastard told her about the neural toxin is true. Death feels close. It feels closer than it’s ever felt before. Her ocular hangs on, but the rest of her vision grays as she realizes she doesn’t have a choice. Using the numeric keys, slowly Wire thumbs in the right credit amounts and adds one of her shadow flowcode addresses in the address field.

Wire presses the icon on the bottom right to finalize the uplink and a trilling chirp confirms the transaction. Britch rips the data tab from her hands.

“There now, was that so hard?”

Wire’s tongue swells like a sausage. “Thheantidooooooo…”

“Oh, right.”

Britch removes a second syringe from his breast pocket and pauses to check whether he has selected the right one. Parrying carefully in case Wire thrusts for his neck with a last ounce of strength, he leans over and sticks the second syringe into Wire’s knee and frees the sedative-antidote with a quick
pfhht
.

As antidote enters her bloodstream, relief rides the rhumba beat of Wire’s quickened pulse. Within seconds her heart slows and the soporific sedative starts to take effect.

Smiling with smug satisfaction, Britch sleeves the data tab on his duty belt, and when Wire’s eyelids close he stands and kicks her in the face.

“Have fun in Surabaya.”

STORM SYSTEM 61.9-Theta–Northern Pacific

Central Pressure — 964 mb

Forward Speed — 15-25 knots

Sustained Wind Speed — 80-112 knots

Storm Surge — 5.5-6 meters

CLASSIFICATION:
HAZARDOUS

The worst storms are always monsters.

With a backpack slung across her shoulders, a girl of thirteen years runs through the screaming, rain-swept dark. Cutting right, cutting left, and cutting right again the girl weaves around the broken, piebald vestiges of what was once a modest manufacturing municipality fixed along the North American prohib coast.

Taking a slippery, moss-covered set of stairs two at a time, through the heavy rain and darkness the girl sees torch beams not too far behind. A quick count of the lights tells her there are least five groups, maybe more, and she hears muffled snatches of barking.

It’s a search party. Someone must have seen her leaving the Commonage. And they’ve brought along the compound’s lone synthetic canine, a blue-furred Mastiff named Gammy.

It’s bad news, but her pursuers bringing along Gammy makes sense. No doubt by now the diagnostic capacities hardwired in the dog’s pronounced snout have all but confirmed her location and heading. Taking off again, the girl fights back her panic and runs faster.

Moving upward through the larger, cordoned sections of the ruined landscape, the girl is knocked sideways by a vertical downdraft. She tastes the dank toxic tang of the ocean on her tongue and with relief realizes she’s now less than quarter of a kilometer from the cliffs along the sea.

You’ve come too far to stop.

You’ll never have another chance at this.

Never.

A minute more of running flat out and she reaches the cliffs. The Pacific’s booming violence is shocking and more than the girl could have imagined. Massive spellbinding troughs of churning froth twelve to twenty meters in height wallop the rocks and shoreline over and over. After hurrying through a thicket along the cliffs’ edge, she locates her stowed-away gear lodged behind two boulders: a second lumbar pack that converts into a sleeping pouch filled with high-caloric rations, along with two canteens of water. The girl buckles the lumbar pack around her waist, clips on the canteens, and removes the backpack from her shaking shoulders.

From the backpack’s main compartment, she withdraws a wound length of line and lashes one end around her waist with a double hitch knot, and then fastens one of four homemade hooks to the lead end of the line with another knot. The line and hooks are her safety apparatuses. Yes, it’ll be a challenge to make her way along the cliff trail for sure, but the search party with Gammy in tow? Without securing hooks with tied-in lines, the gusts will be too much for them. They’d be crazy to follow.

As she jams her body sideways into the trail’s first tight pass, the girl’s thoughts pulsate. Imagine, no more Commonage. No more stupid collective edicts, no more spouting the hypocritical babble her parents are so fond of, and, most important, no more Sébastien or Dr. Corella. It’s the last point that strengthens her resolve. No more Sébastien and his puzzling creepiness or Dr. Corella’s phony compassion; those two and all their terrible, warped plans.

Eight meters in and the initial trail switchback is her first real test. Girding herself and pressing her body as close to the rock face as possible, with her right hand the girl lifts the hook end of the line. The switchback’s turn is sharp and fully exposed on the rounding, and when she peers around the edge her eyes get stung by a full-on sock of whipping spray. The girl lifts the lead end of the line and reaches out for a crag when a deafening wail drills through the watery roar.

A quick glance at the storm-thrashed waves reveals an incomprehensible sight. A thousand meters out, a black-marbled wave of astounding size is pierced from below by a submarine. Skate-shaped with floodlights alight along its curved flanks, the breaching vessel bellies down the wave’s face and, as its bow dips, lambent phosphorescent engines in its stern shriek with the sudden exposure to the air. Breaking, the wave becomes a dooming avalanche of white water and propels the sub forward.

Behind the girl, suddenly a beam of light splits the darkness and her heart leaps into her throat. Torn-away cries beg her to stop, and she can hear Gammy barking. Cringing, the girl adjusts her hold for only a second, and slips.

After all her preparation, after all her meticulous mental rehearsals, her failure to hook into a crag is a mortifying error. Like an invisible hand, a hard blast of wind yanks her backward and out.

Inexplicably, the final moments of the young girl’s life are everything and nothing all at once—hyperconscious pulling the world together and apart at the speed of light.

Everything is fear.

Everything is loss.

Everything is beauty and sadness and regret with the possibility of unimaginable pain moments away.

No one will be able to stop Sébastien and Dr. Corella now. She’s failed.

The submarine crosses the girl’s line of sight twice just before it collides and inverts on the rocks below.

Last thought:

So this is what it’s like to die…

With a jackhammering slam and metallic squeal the submarine’s endless nauseating churning stops—
KA-BAM
! And like that, Koko’s entire subaquatic world is upside down.

She’s lashed securely in the pilot’s seat in the sub’s forward bridge, her legs and arms dangling out, a meat chandelier. Stupefied by the impact, she’s still able to judge that she’s intact. Bruised ribs, seasick to beat the band, and upside down, but, yeah, still miraculously intact. No dislocations or broken bones, she thinks, though there’s no way to know for sure until she gets down from the bridge deck and pilot’s seat that is now, in effect, the sub’s ceiling. With a deflating croon, the sub’s fusion engines power down and then cut off. Emergency backup lighting in the cabin sputters on and a pinwheeling tangerine wash cycles all around.

Like an ogre’s punch, a wave hurtles into the sub’s stern and one by one the cabin lights start to fail. Outside the bow screen, the view is blacker than black, with a re-forming slide of white bubbles shifting in abstract. Koko believes she can make out the edge of a surface of some kind. Greenish rock, kelp peppered with white.

Are those… barnacle
s?

Oh, shit—we’ve run aground
.

Another wave hits and with a stomach-turning creak it slowly spins the sub around like a turtle flipped on its back. Koko then detects an unmistakable pressure differential and a shrill, cold whistle pouring past her ears. A briny stench and then another noise that’s muculent at first and then rushing.

The hull has been breached.

Koko looks back for Flynn and sees he’s still inverted and lashed into a makeshift berth in the submarine’s narrowed stern section. All wadded up in his puffy lifejacket, he still mercifully looks out of it, as he has been for days with the spread of his infection. Like a morbid party balloon, Flynn’s head hangs at a terrible angle.

A third wave erupts on the hull and terror grabs Koko by the throat. Beneath her feet, an eddying slosh of water rises.

Koko gropes for the clip on the pilot seat’s safety harness. Freeing a buckled lever, she crashes brutally into the vessel’s ceiling-now-deck. The impact sends an ache up her leg like it’s been popped with a meat mallet, and she feels something hard pressing into her back. It’s a ruptured metallic edge torn free. Koko rolls over and pushes up, scurrying hand over hand into the rising broth aft.