Koko Uncaged E-Book

Kieran Shea

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

The third and final instalment in the fast-paced kick-ass Koko trilogy described by Booklist as "[A] futuristic wild ride… Great fun". Surviving job loss, an unsettled vendetta, a submarine wreck, heartbreak, and mortal carnage on a tokusatsu scale, Koko P. Martstellar (ex-corporate mercenary and saloon/brothel owner) is trying to reassemble what's left of her life. Being hired to protect global industrialist Bogart Gōng seems like as good a place to start as any, but bodyguard work isn't the cakewalk Koko thought it'd be. Throw in some autocratic malfeasance, a hatchet man with a fl air for the dramatic, a South American despot, lovers back from the grave, and a high-speed race at a prison, and you've a brain-melting cocktail of cyberpunk satire that's impossible to put down.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Also Available from Kieran Shea and Titan Books

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Diegesis: Now then, Where Were We?

Part 1: What Becomes of the Brokenhearted

Ex Luna, Ex Tempore, Incipere… Tweedlee-Dee-Dee

Hey, Rockstar, Look where you are

Nemesister: Jackie Wire

Proposition Gōng

Junkyard Deal

Terms of the Pocket Defined

Gōng-Ward and Upward to Mermao

Gammy 2.0

Flynn: Aspirant, Commonager, Lost

How the Cookie Crumbles

Ready with it

Wire, Southward Ho!

Peripety: In the Land of the Surprising Sun

Here She Comes A-Slaughtering

Oh Hey, Would you Like Another Cup of Rue?

It’s A Living: Maybe, Baby, I Don’t Know

Gammy

Good Morning, This is your Captor Speaking

Mermao Cabeza

Gauntlet-Challenge-Choice

Greet the Geeks

Come Go with Me

Stage A Scene

Disaster By Decree: Gōng Goes for it

On the Feeds—Jaguar: Fuera De La Bolsa

Phillipic: Viva La Verbatim

Yay, Sports!

Ennui, Dismissed

Flynn the Forlorn

Gammy, in Wait

How Fortuitous?

He’s your Man

Hypodiegesis or the Coincidence (Slim) of the Unregaled

Part 2: The Raging

Fully Loaded, Stercus Accidit

Un Hombre Leal, Un Hombre Peligroso

Yay, Sports (2)

The Good Dog: Gammy

Worship From Hate

Prognosticating

Publicity and Travel

What A Hole, What A Hole, What A Hole

Bow Wow, Nothing New

Tutti-Frutti, Shout-Shout (Knock yourself Out)

Trial Run, Provisional Goons

Soarin’

Ready, Set, Whoa

Yay, Sports (3)

Let’s Get Spicy

Yay, Sports (4)

Zoom-Zoom

A Matter of Chatter

Up the Six-Er-Oni

Koko and Gōng: Closing Time

Pre-Pronounce and Pounce

In Sum

Yay, Sports (5)

In From Above

Now where Did that Thing Come From?

What Rule of Three?

The Microseconds of the Grassed Ass

Evasive Reckoning

Mermao: The Victory Lap?

Plan B

What you Do at your Waterloo

Everything Bleeds

Surcease: Keep on Keeping on

Notes

About the Author

KOKO UNCAGED

Also available from Kieran Shea and Titan Books

KOKO TAKES A HOLIDAYKOKO THE MIGHTY

OFF ROCK

KIERAN SHEAKOKO UNCAGED

TITANBOOKS.COM

Koko UncagedPaperback edition ISBN: 9781785653742Electronic edition ISBN: 9781785653414

Published by Titan BooksA division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

First edition: June 20181 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

Kieran Shea asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

© 2018 by Kieran Shea. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

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FOR ALL THOSE WHO TAKE THEMSELVES WAY TOO SERIOUSLY—IF YOUDIDN’T COME TO PARTY DON’T BOTHER KNOCKING ON MY DOOR.

VOT SOBAKA.

V.I. LENIN (LAST WORDS)

DIEGESIS: NOW THEN, WHERE WERE WE?1

For ex-brothel operator and retired mercenary Koko P. Martstellar, the year 2516 has been a bad one.

How bad?

Well, one might be inclined to say horrendous. For starters, an old mentor of Koko’s, one backstabbing Portia Delacompte, endeavored to murder her to whitewash a career-killing secret Koko helped Delacompte cover up some years prior. Directly following this, with a price on her head, Koko found herself chased halfway across the suborbital sky-dwelling confederacies of the Second Free Zone by a trio of ruthless, eye-eating bounty agents. Hare and hounds, it was during this time she met Jedidiah Flynn, a suicidal, Depressus-stricken2security deputy aboard an SFZ residential barge called Alaungpaya. Flynn, not caring if he died, was game for helping Koko elude her hunters, and it was a three-ringed circus there for a while, but Flynn and Koko persevered and even managed to fall for each other along the way. Through some finagling and embarrassment, those running The Sixty Islands gave Koko her old job back, with Flynn and Koko managing a new saloon/brothel operation as a team.

Cool, right?

Not so fast.

Turns out, a short while later and just before their new establishment’s grand opening, one of the bounty agents after Koko, a woman by the name of Jackie Wire, showed up to punch Koko’s ticket, and in the confusion Wire shoots Flynn in the leg. With their options drying up on the lickety-split, Koko and Flynn steal a maintenance submarine and escape The Sixty Islands in the hope of reaching C-GRAP, the Canadian government’s strip-mining provinces above the Vancouver supercities. Mid-voyage across the Pacific, a technical issue aggravated by a shoal of hungry giant squid renders the submarine unable to submerge and, with Flynn near death from his wound’s infection, they are blown off course. Drawn up into a massive extra-tropical storm system, they wreck along a once-thought-to-be uninhabitable coast just as a young teenage girl mysteriously falls to her death from the cliffs above.

Rescued by the search party looking for the teenage girl, Flynn and Koko are taken to a bohemian outpost known as the Commonage. Financed by ex-wunderkind Sébastien Maxx and operated with his research partner Dr. Corella, the Commonage at first appears to be a benign settlement, but all is not what it seems. While Koko suspects something is amiss, Flynn is seduced by the Commonage’s counterculture.

In the meantime, back on The Sixty, Wire is deported to Surabaya and renews her search for Koko with zeal. Wire’s pursuit eventually leads her to the vicinity of the Commonage, where everything comes to a head in a night raid that involves Wire, a band of itinerant de-civs, Flynn, Koko, Sébastien Maxx, the Commonage occupants, and a blue-furred synthetic Mastiff named Gammy. As the raid climaxes, Flynn is shot again, Sébastien is killed, and both Wire and Koko are rendered unconscious by flying bricks. Under the direction of Flynn, Dr. Corella dispatches Koko to the lunar mining freighter Omalhaut, owned by the Itokawa Corporation. Koko awakens halfway to the moon to a prerecorded message from Dr. Corella, erroneously claiming that Flynn is dead. While he doesn’t communicate it to Koko, Dr. Corella also elects to exile Wire to the greater North American prohibs rather than kill her off. At the end of this stage of the adventure, we conclude with Wire ground-pounding her way back north to civilization and the Vancouver supercities.

Onward…

PART 1WHAT BECOMES OF THE BROKENHEARTED

EX LUNA, EX TEMPORE, INCIPERE… TWEEDLEE-DEE-DEE

In her ever-expanding purview of sincerely fucked-up scenarios, being forced to deal with a belligerent, naked hijacker in space pretty much tears it for Koko P. Martstellar.

On a good day and perhaps better-equipped (i.e., armed to the teeth, fully stretched, and one hundred percent hale), well—shit yeah—Koko definitely had the sand for such a situation, no question. But seeing as at present she’s (a) trapped behind a zither of frequency trip-beams synced to an anti-personnel mine, and (b) still recovering from near fatal wounds, not the least of which is a broken heart, right now wrangling control of this situation ain’t exactly a bowl of duck soup.

Ten meters ahead of her on the hexagonal forward operating bridge of the Omalhaut, the hijacker hollers with unfiltered zeal:

“From beginning, there has never been meaning! Man worst! History is laugh-laugh joke! God demands extinction!”

To the rest of the crewmembers huddled directly behind her, but mostly to herself, Koko subvocalizes.

“Umm, does anyone know what the sweet fuck this guy is talking about?”

The ship’s medical officer, a portly German croaker by the name of Dr. Piefke, checks his dataslate and advises. “His name is Živko Dragovich, payload specialist. Updated file says that just after lunar departure, labor mainframes terminated his Itokawa position. Citations for erratic behavior, both male and female attempted rape, and multiple warnings for public onanism. He was also accused of hundreds of forbidden perspective-militant downloads from black market entertainment feeds.”

A perspective-militant rapist?

Terrific, Koko thinks. Here she is, still on the tender mend with barely thirty thousand credits left to her name, thousands of kilometers from Earth just weeks after her beau was murdered by a psychotic bounty agent, her ass shanghaied to the moon, and this pink-slipped, fanatical dipstick thinks now’s a good time to lose his tether and spout nihilistic drool?

Girlfriend, please…

Paring her way closer to the bridge’s narrow access hatch, Koko floats in zero-g weightlessness and studies the anti-personnel mine affixed to the starboard side of the ingress. The small AP-mine is rectangular, bottle green, and embossed with a frieze of lettering in half a dozen languages declaring front toward enemy. Secured to the bulkhead with black magnetic tape, the device projects infrared trip-beams in an argyle pattern to an opposing set of mounted receptors. Koko shoves the sleeves up on her loaner Itokawa Corporation flight suit. After closer examination, she determines the mine is a stock directional device. Lightweight, portable, and effective. Years back when she was an around-the-clock slay machine for whomever coded her paycheck, Koko used similar munitions on a fairly regular basis, but rarely, if ever, did she activate trip-beam illuminations. To wit, why give your enemy a heads-up when your objective is to make their ass grass? Then again, Koko seems to recall using trip-beams once or twice for temporary stockade arrangements, which, paradoxically, happens to be her and the rest of the crew’s current situation. Under routine circumstances disarming an APM is a fairly prosaic exercise, but—lucky her—the bare-assed yo-yo at the controls seems to have butt-welded the mine’s priming panel shut. Believing every last gram of the Omalhaut had been triple-checked and accounted for prior to departure for the moon, Koko is a bit miffed that the explosive got smuggled aboard in the first place. Oh hell, she thinks, what’s the worst that could happen? Barring systemic failures, she’s pretty sure the ship’s internal integrities are hearty enough to withstand a small blast from this kind of explosive. But her and the rest of the crew crammed and locked in the tight five-meter alcove? Things are not looking so good.

Except for medical attention from Piefke (an eccentric arrangement finessed by Piefke’s former colleague back in the North American prohibs—a goateed little weenie named Dr. Corella) Koko has pretty much kept to herself during her convalescence aboard the Omalhaut. Other than yakking with Piefke, she hasn’t spoken more than two or three words to anyone else aboard the freighter, and for good reason. Losing Jedidiah Flynn has Koko gutted. Not familiar with the desolation of insuperable grief and having little else to do before the Omalhaut was loaded with its raw cargo for its return to Earth, Koko found focusing on getting well helped her work through her mourning. But the weight of Flynn’s loss feels like a phantasmagoric hole inside her, and she wonders if the cold, hollowed-out feeling will ever go away.

And now, of course, this horseshit.

“Are there any other ways to bypass this entry?” Koko asks.

Piefke whispers, “Ja-ja, if we could reach our EVA hardshell suits by the main airlocks, and if the Omalhaut was in orbit. But Dragovich sealed every deck when we answered the all-hands alarm. There is no way to bypass. Wir sind gefangen!”

Koko looks behind her at the rest of the crew locked inside the alcove.

“So it’s eight against one.”

“Nein-nein, niiiiine.”

Koko shakes her head. “I may’ve been keeping a low profile, but I’ve been taking my meals in the ship’s mess like everybody else. The Omalhaut’s crew including the captain is nine plus one, with the plus one being yours truly. Minus Mr. Nudist up there, that’s eight. I don’t think the captain is in the game anymore.”

Piefke peers around Koko’s shoulder through the mesh of red APM trip-beams. The Omalhaut’s captain floats just off to port, near the forward casement windows. His face is bloodied and a plump squiggle of pinkish brain matter protrudes from the back of his tangerine crew-cut like a bloodworm. When Piefke turns to Koko again, his soft Teutonic flesh trembles like gelatin.

“The captain, he might still be alive.”

“Doubtful.”

“So what do you suggest we do?”

Koko gags. “Ho, ho—me? What do I suggest we do?”

“Ja-ja! Before I consented to treat you, Dr. Corella told me you had been a soldier. Cranial scans indicate you have ocular implant scarring, so this is true, no?”

Jerking him sidelong by the arm, Koko drops her voice. “Listen, Herr Doktor. I’m sorry, but weeks ago you told me your superiors weren’t exactly thrilled to learn I was on this freighter in the first place. Because you owed some old colleague a favor and managed to smooth things over with your higher-ups doesn’t mean I’m obligated to you, or to anyone else for that matter. And for the record, my soldiering days are over. All I want is to get back to Earth in one piece. I mean, isn’t somebody next in command on this bucket?”

Piefke looks at his feet soberly. “After captain, I am next.”

“Then you figure this nonsense out.”

“B-b-but I have never taken the helm before,” Piefke implores. “Of course, I passed the simulation requirements, but these translunar–Earth flights are supposed to be routine. Program guidance, velocities, everything is locked in with redundant backups. If he’s disabled these systems or sabotaged them in any way, I wouldn’t know what to do.”

Koko seems to recall there being word in German that means a face badly in need of a punch.3

“You dumb pronk, that’s not the point. As second-in-command, it’s your goddamn responsibility to tell the rest of us what to do.”

“Okay-okay, then this is what I order. You give me your advice.”

“Someone you don’t even know?”

“But being a former soldier you have faced standoffs before, ja-ja?”

“Oh, get bent, doc. This isn’t a standoff. That meathead in there has the upper hand.”

“The explosive, then? Perhaps you can disarm it?”

“He welded the priming panel shut.”

“So nothing can be done?”

“No.”

“But we must do something.”

Oh, for crying out loud. This whimpering company man, bringing up the goddamn “we” again. Koko wouldn’t even be in this cockamamy BSGD4 state of affairs if it hadn’t been for those conniving nutcases back at the Commonage, Sébastien Maxx and Dr. Corella. Heaving a deep, steadying breath, Koko leans in and grabs Piefke by his flight suit.

“That guy could’ve set up that mine in half a dozen more critical areas on this ship, right?”

“Ja…”

“So maybe with the all-hands alarm he drew us here for a reason. Right now, with the exception of jelly noodle in there, we’re all still sucking air. In my book, that translates. We might be hostages. Maybe he’s got demands.”

“Then you negotiate.”

Koko groans and shoves Piefke back. Jamming a couple of fingers into her mouth, she whistles hard. “Ahoy there, nature boy. I hate to interrupt whatever it is you think you’re doing, but would you mind telling us what this is all about?”

When the man called Dragovich rolls away from the helm, Koko at last gets a full look at his unclothed dimensions and blinks as if a cloud of sawdust has just flown into her eyes. Of course, she’s seen Dragovich bopping around from time to time like the rest of the crew, but usually this was when he was wearing a hardshell EVA suit. As with everyone else aboard, she’s hardly given the man a second thought. Topping out close to her height and a half, the payload specialist is enormous. Like sumo wrestler enormous, without the fundoshi crotch sling. He is easily a hundred and thirty kilos and hairy from head to toe. With cannonball-muscled arms and thighs the diameter of snare drums, when he bounces toward her his semi-erect shlong flaps like a dead squirrel between his legs.

“I tell you what this about,” says Dragovich. “This is destiny.”

Koko tongues her cheek briefly. “Oh, I see. Destiny. No offense, but that’s kind of vague, my friend. Could you maybe, like, be a little more specific?”

Dragovich murmurs something and then careens his way back to the helm. Easing down at the controls he doesn’t strap into a safety harness, but he does continue talking, his broken syntax mocking and meaningless as space.

“Piefke is stupid, but he is right. I corrupt all navigations. Soon Omalhaut cross geo-c satellite tracks and, on re-entry, Second Free Zone orbits in upper atmosphere. Then my intentions to Itokawa Corporation and feeds be made.”

Intentions? Gee, that doesn’t sound good.

“Can you maybe give us a hint of what those intentions are?”

“Be quiet now, monkey woman.”

Monkey woman? Koko looks back at the distraught crew. “Well, I’ve got to tell you, chief. While I know you’re probably all cheesed off about losing your job and all, outfits like the Itokawa Corporation don’t typically negotiate with ex-employees commandeering their property. They especially aren’t partial to said ex-employees cracking open their former captains’ skulls.”

“Bahahaha! Captain stupid like Piefke stupid. He fought back. And what you say now? Negotiate? Bahahaha! Not interested in negotiate. No negotiate.”

He presses a button on starboard, and pleated manifolds, conformal charts, and vicinal A-S shipping channels of southernmost South America materialize.

“See you now this? There. That is our destination. No facility in SAC state Argentina, but a few hundred kilometers east—that is target.”

“What target?”

“Fookloonz.”

“Fook what?”

“Fookloonz.”

“You mean the Falklands?”

“Da-da! For many, many year now, a haven for capitalist pigs. I will destroy as many of the greedy as I can.”

Through the forward casements the stelliferous field of the infinite is replaced by the blue four-point-five-billion-year-old marble of Earth. Propulsion systems fire and rumble like boulders in a landslide and the freighter picks up speed. Koko and the rest of the crew hang on. Piefke’s face has lost all color.

“Mein Gott! He wants to crash the ship? We have to do something!”

The other crewmembers feverishly start searching the alcove’s walls, padded panels, and wiry recesses for something, anything, they can pry free to force open the locked hatch behind them. Meantime, Koko re-examines the attached APM and shoots a look at Piefke.

“How much time do we have?”

“Before re-entry?”

“No, before I punch you in the throat. Yes, before re-entry.”

“Ich weiss nicht—ten, eleven minutes? Maybe less? Bitte, I do not want to die. Not like this.”

Koko corks an urge to slap Piefke. She doesn’t want to die like this either, so with the greatest of care she traces a fingertip along the welding scars on the APM’s priming panel. She’s looking for possible weak spots, but damn it all to hell she can’t find any. Dragovich’s welding job is tight. If she’d the time and the proper tools maybe Koko could scrape away at the welding scars, but even so, it’s been ages since she deactivated a live mine. The crazy freak could’ve tinkered with the APM’s firing system’s sensitivities. The slightest tremor or magnetic contact and ka-blooey.

Koko has an idea.

Holistically speaking, the idea is not the best she’s ever come up with, and it’s undeniably brutally imprudent, but, ad-libbing with a clock winding down, she can’t think of an alternative. This is about her own survival.

Pushing Piefke to the rear of the alcove, she quickly orders the entire crew to huddle up as far back in the passage as they can. Their collective dismay leaves little resistance, and knowing that all of them overheard that she was a soldier once, Koko presumes they must think she’s figured a way out of this mess. Far from it. Shoving everyone into a ruck, she tells them to lock arms and try to make their bodies as small as possible. Koko avoids Piefke’s watery eyes.

Goddamn, she’s done some coldblooded stuff in her life, but now is not the time to draw straws. Pawing her way to the back of the cluster, she flattens her boots against the locked-off hatch, gathers all her quadricep strength, and drives the orb of bodies right into the APM’s trip-beams.

There’s a soft snick as propelling boosters release and a split second later a superheated mule kick of fluid dynamics revokes all sound. Tucked in a ball, Koko flies backward and slams into the sealed hatch.

Not knowing how much time has passed or if she is still alive, when she finally opens her eyes the alcove is a dripping abattoir in abstract. Burning entrails, rendered muscle and smashed bone, everything is pungent with the stench of scorched blood. Overhead, twisted sections of metal housing creak like branches as atomized fire retardants kick in. Justifiably woozy and deafened by the blast, Koko inspects herself and finds she’s still miraculously intact. While she’s covered with lord knows whose innards, she believes none of the blood is her own. Her head feels as if it’s been whacked with a sledgehammer. Past the ringing in her ears, a muffled bellow sounds.

Dragovich.

Koko moves through the casserole of ghoulish body parts to a gash that, before the explosion, was the threshold to the bridge. Sailing forward, and using what she can to propel her weightless body, she gathers her center just as Dragovich hails the Itokawa Corporation and worldwide feed media outlets over the comm.

“Your greed is futility! Your greed brings you your death!”

Koko knows death. She’s served with death, eaten with death, and someday she and death will meet and tango again, but today is not that day.

Dragovich slings around just as Koko is midway across the bridge. He pitches the freighter blindly to starboard in an attempt to disorientate, and Koko follows the momentum. Caroming off the sloped, starboard-side assemblies, she lunges for Dragovich’s throat and just about ricochets off his chest. Dragovich slashes away her arms like they are those of a child, and before she can move away his own arms wrap around her. As he is readying himself for the final anaconda squeeze, Koko squirms, arches her head back, and thrusts forward. She shatters Dragovich’s nose with the front of her head. Not the best thing to do after surviving a mine blast—she nearly blacks out and her retinas light up with stars.

Thrashing, Dragovich tries to throw her off and regroup, but Koko holds fast to his hairy skin. Knowing she might not get another shot at being so close, the proximity of his face is a gift. Clawing both sides of his head, she vises his temples together, levers in her left thumb, and gouges out his left eye.

Dragovich howls. Deafened as she is, Koko can barely hear his scream but, man oh man, she does feel the vibrations of his rage. She bites down on Dragovich’s face and tears a piece of flesh from his cheek.

His face is now a fount of dripping blood and still Dragovich won’t let her go. Koko thrusts her chin higher on the right side of his face and finds what she’s after: globular paydirt. She bites down, sucks hard, and sawing her teeth back and forth Koko rips out Dragovich’s other eye.

At a shattering one hundred and ten decibels, Dragovich bays like a manchild and fumbles his hands wildly across his face. Koko rolls herself free and seizes one of his arms. Crowbarring the elbow joint against her knee, the wet give comes and Dragovich keeps screaming. Enough is enough. Koko reels around and chops a fatal blow into the side of his neck.

Koko spits out his eyeball. “Loser…”

As he’s no longer a concern, she shoves Dragovich aside. Outside the forward casements the wispy upper exo, thermo, and mesospheres of Earth loom. A half-dozen geo-c satellites soar past dangerously close, and one of the dead captain’s drooping feet knocks Koko in the head. She slaps the foot away and glares at the freighter’s helm. It takes a second to locate the comm, and scrolling through the interface she activates all receiving space, air, Second Free Zone, and terrestrial channels.

“Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! This is IC vessel Omalhaut! Does anyone out there copy?”

A polyglottic tempest of crosstalk pours in from all over. Koko can barely shuffle her eyes fast enough as the list of responder identifications scrolls across the comm like a slot machine. Man alive, her ears are killing her, but then, albeit faintly, a tongue she recognizes streams in stronger than the rest.

“Omalhaut, this is Itokawa Corporation Mission Control. We have you. Advise on your critical status, over.”

Koko locks onto the frequency and blank-deletes the rest of the responders.

“Advise on my what?”

“Repeat. Omalhaut, this is ICMC. Advise on your critical status, over.”

Oh, for the love of—I’m screaming fucking mayday, bonehead! Isn’t that, like, enough?

Koko mows her hands over the rest of the controls, both the lower and slanted ceiling consoles. While she knows how to operate all sorts of aircraft, a space freighter is a sister from another mister. Not only does the apparent complexity not compare to controls she’s more familiar with, the sheer number of knobs, levers, arrays, potentiometric dials, and switches of uncertain consequence number in the hundreds. Rattled as she is, it’s a struggle to make sense of anything and the edges of her vision start to blur. To keep herself from passing out, she bites her lip hard enough to draw blood.

The Omalhaut barrels on into the atmosphere and overall turbulence increases. Slipping into the captain’s seat, she clips in. The normally cool processed air suddenly feels warmer and there’s an unpleasant smell of smoke. When a pictogram gauge with a flame on it starts squeaking like a chew toy she loses it.

“Fuck, I can’t—control negative! All systems down! Repeat, all systems down! Crew and captain are dead! Omalhaut descending into atmosphere and closing in on the Second Free Zone! Request immediate remote override of all navigational systems, over!”

“Stand by, Omalhaut…”

Koko squeegees perspiration and blood from her face with her fingertips. The hotplate temperature grows as twelve tinted heat shields lower over the forward casements. She’s flying in the blind.

“Okey-dokey, Omalhaut,” ICMC advises in an authoritative baritone. “Remote override link with your freighter established. Descent trajectory, re-entry velocity, and course correction confirmed. You’re five by five and spanky. ICMC requests immediate explanation of crew’s status, over.”

Asshole, they’re dead.

All of them are dead.

But, oh man—should she actually convey that over the comm? That she just pulped almost all of them and snapped Dragovich’s neck just to save her own ass? Not a great piece of news to be disclosing, and on a legal front, imprudent.

Koko decides not to respond, and her mind instead glides into a bizarre Proustian flashback. She sees Flynn in lighter days back on The Sixty, back when they were getting the new saloon online, when Flynn was still alive and things weren’t so irretrievably screwed up. In a spill of goldenrod, palm-patterned shadow he smiles meekly as if to say that everything will be all right. Goddamn, Flynn could really drive her up the wall sometimes with that sacchariferous keep-the-faith claptrap. Truth is, though things were all right for a while, maybe she shouldn’t have expected it to last.

A siren pulls Koko out of her reverie and the diagnostic screen just to port defines the crisis. Seventeen protective plates have shaken loose along the starboard quarter and flight integrity may be compromised. Read it and weep: sixty to eighty percent likelihood of total failure. The g-loads begin and smush the air from her lungs.

Aw hell, she thinks, why should I even try anymore? Flynn, the one person who ever came close to mattering to her, is dead. She’d had the power to save him and she failed. Just let her burn up, just let her fragment into a billion red-hot pieces and streak across the sky, meteoric. Is there anything left to live for anyway?

“Omalhaut, this ICMC. Please respond.”

Koko passes out.

HEY, ROCKSTAR, LOOK WHERE YOU ARE

A day and who knows how many mislaid hours later, Koko shudders awake and discovers woefully that once again she has no idea where she is.

Groggily, she rubs the warm heels of her palms into her eyes. On two elongated brass pipes directly above there are a pair of cream-colored ceiling paddles, swooping slow. She can hear the soft displacement of air, so at least her hearing has returned to some level of normal. But this air smells sweet, fecund and organic. And there’s something else. The faint salty tang of the sea.

Koko sits up and looks around.

No way. This can’t possibly be right.

She must be dreaming.

Nix dreaming; she must be tripping major balls. Either that or all that mumbo-jumbo about there being an afterworld, a notion Koko had handily dismissed forever, has somehow turned out to be true. To her wonder, she discovers she’s in a white-sheeted, king-sized bed in a large circular room. To her right, beyond billowing white-draped portals and across an open, rain-washed lanai, the one-hundred-and-eighty-degree view is as limitless as it is spectacular. Sapphire seas beneath puffy cottontail clouds in a cerulean sky, replete with a densely hued rainbow parabola. The room itself is light on décor, but there are several large potted plants. The hewn floorboards spread out from beneath the bed in warm, buffed lines and form a compass rose, and the bleached plaster walls and vaulted ceiling with its fans and contrasting beams spread up like a majestic pantheon. The building, hereafter, or wherever she is, also appears to be set on a rise like the prow of a great ship. Maybe two hundred meters off in the virid jungle distance, a waterfall spills over an outcropping of black volcanic stone and cascades to a shoreline beyond her sight line. A distension of coral bends form heavy-bottomed waves glassed to a jeweled purity not more than a few hundred yards out.

“Good morning,” someone says, “or should I say good afternoon?”

Whipping across the bed and dragging the sheets around her like a bridal train, Koko drops onto the floor with a clunk. Peering around the bed’s edge she sees a man standing in a doorway on the far side of the room. As he steps forward, more than a few things come into focus: obvious Chinese genetics, medium athletic build, a dove-grey business suit, band-collared white shirt, and polished black loafers. His tailoring is unimpeachable, hanging without bulge or crease. Possibly late-forties, decent-looking but not particularly hubba-hubba dashing. He presents himself in a manner of reserved placidity. Koko immediately looks down at herself to see if she has any clothes on and she does: a silky indigo chemise with lace trimming mid-thigh. Koko grows angry when she realizes she’s bare-assed underneath.

“What is this place?”

The man flourishes an arm. “This? This is a guest bungalow. It’s one of my newer designs.”

Koko eases up her head until her chin is level with the top of the mattress. “Your newer designs?”

“Antebellum architecture of the late twenty-first century is a hobby of mine. When possible, I always try to tweak the details to get things just right. Tell me, do you find the tropical aesthetic soothing?”

“What kind of question is that? Fuck the tropical aesthetic. What am I doing here? Who are you?”

“My apologies, Miss Martstellar. My name is Gōng, Bogart Gōng.”

“Gōng?”

“Like the instrument, yes. And my first name is a longer part of the story. Many years ago, my engendered collective, one of the greater East Asia labor-breeding units in Shandong, was hit by a super typhoon known as Quiang-23. I don’t really remember the storm as I was an infant at the time, but it turns out the matron of the flotilla orphanage that took me in was a fan of antediluvian cinema. Her favorite picture was about some sibilant hangdog in exile, hence my forename. She said we had the same crooked smile. As for Gōng, it’s a common enough surname in Shandong. Before the tragic preemptive hostilities and subsequent societal whorls, for centuries here in Japan there’s been entrenched xenophobia against people of my heritage. Instilling a go-getter’s determination in me, the matron at the flotilla orphanage felt it imperative for me to hold onto a small shred of my ancestral identity. I am President, CEO, and founder of the Itokawa Corporation.”

Oh man, lights up. Here we go.

Koko considers her options. If she hurls herself into a full sprint maybe she can make it to the waterfall, climb down to the beach, and try to swim for it. But, say… wait a second, didn’t this guy just say they were in Japan? Not for nothing, but Koko has been to Japan before. The country is a failed state, a veritable sump hole with its northern and southern regions contaminated by pollution. Only Tokyo remains as an operating prefecture. As a solitary garrison, the city exists only by dint of a roster of tax-gracious capital incentives, and totaled, if you added those working for business consortia with those struggling to serve their maintenance and venal ukiyo needs, the population ran roughly nine and a half million and change. Taking in the vista’s gorgeous setting, Koko for sure knows something isn’t right. She is about to point this out when Gōng continues.

“My on-call medical practitioner advised me when you would be up and about.”

“Oh, and is this on-call medical practitioner the same pervert who dressed me in these frisky pajamas?”

The orthodontic splendor of Gōng’s smile is both beatific and irksome. “I assure you, Miss Martstellar. You’ve not been molested in any way. And the practitioner you just referred to is actually a celibate septuagenarian who’s quite dedicated to her vocation. With your contentious background I know being leery has probably served you well, and waking up in a strange place with no idea how you got there must be jarring.”

“I’ve come to in worse places.”

Either by her own recklessness or by the less than honorable intentions of others, Koko has regained her faculties in a number of execrable places, more often than not after a thick slab of misplaced time. Bamboo-spiked jail pits, damp ceasefire foxholes along the Kara Sea, the befouled beds of long-forgotten sexual prospects. She once awoke in Astana swooning from a massive grappa irrigation just as a funeral parade was starting, and another time she greeted the day in Mozambique half-soused on scorpion chamba in the lap of a beheaded statue. A complete cosmorama of bulldozed buildings, sweat-marinated sparring mats, sketchy rathskellers swamped with swill… not to mention quite recently aboard the Omalhaut, after taking a second-hand pulse round and getting hit in the noggin with, of all things, a brick. The list of locations is onerous, like the credits of a really awful biopic, but honestly, if she had to pick the worst place where she came to, it’s got to be Klaipėda on her second field op for Global Resource/Syndicate Deployment Initiatives. Klaipėda, start to finish, is a memory that even now makes her ill.

Part of a four-person fire team, the GR/SDI direct action (code name GILTINĖ, after the Baltic goddess of death) was supposed to be a cinch. After a high-altitude, low-opening jump from a fixed-wing MTA at twenty-seven thousand feet, the team was to reach a warehouse facility that had been infested with armed, hunkered-down de-civs and clear it for redevelopment. A last-minute scheduling change by GR/SDI forced transport subcontracting, and the subcontractor’s out-of-date GPS had a groundspeed glitch that made the damn pilot overshoot the drop zone. Chutes deployed, and after drifting for twenty klicks under cover of a starless night, the team landed in a solid waste processing plant. If plummeting into the vile, sweltering tarns of human excrement wasn’t enough, Koko’s head hit an overflow pipe on landing and she nearly drowned in shit. One of her team pulled her literally from the shit, and after resuscitation she violently puked her guts out for twenty minutes. Since the Klaipėda operation had an open completion window, the whole team agreed to temporarily delay the mission and hunt down the pilot. True, Koko got in some good licks when the rest of the fire team beat the pilot half to death, but to this day anytime someone refers to another as a “potty mouth”, Koko has to suppress dry heaves.

“I’m sure you’ve woken in any number of horrible places,” Gōng says. “But this isn’t so dreadful now, is it?”

Koko rises from her crouch. Next to the bed on a nightstand is a small demijohn bottle. Sidestepping and keeping her eyes on Gōng, she picks the bottle up and cracks the cap. Sniffing, she doesn’t detect bad, and when she tries a quick sip she finds the liquid devoid of taste.

“That’s water,” Gōng says.

“Better be.”

Stepping further into the room, Gōng addresses the ceiling.

“Discontinue primary program.”

All at once, everything—the architecture, the gorgeous ocean vista, the varnished wooden floors, even the warm breeze scented with flowers and the hopping kookaburra birds—all of it dissolves into a white, spherical chamber, twenty meters in diameter. The walls of the chamber are outfitted with giant rhombic hexagons crosshatched by thousands of flickering translucent cables. To Koko it looks like they’re in a radome, or a colossal soccer ball.

“Well, that’s disenchanting.”

“State-of-the-art AR replicator with afferent nerve support,” Gōng explains. “With the new microclimate enhancements, I can even make it snow in here if I want. For my particular interests the supplementary abiotic components allow me limitless flexibility. I usually elect to set fire to these constructs.”

“Fire?”

“I find burning things quite cathartic.”

“So other than your stylin’ self-gratification chamber, where am I exactly?”

“Itokawa Corporation headquarters in Tokyo. My penthouse suite of offices and attached maisonette living lofts, to be precise.”

Koko’s face collapses.

“Is something wrong?” Gōng asks.

“Possibly. What’re my chances of conferring with legal counsel?”

“Legal counsel? Oh, I see. Well, perhaps it would be better if we discuss your present situation over some lunch.”

“Lunch?”