Koko the Mighty (8 page)

On a scale from one to ten, with one being pretty bad and ten being a grisly incubus of horror obliterating rational thought, waking up to a pair of rats gnawing your lower lip definitely levels Wire’s dial at ten point nine.

Flopping over into a puddle, Wire screams. The rat hinged on her lip is nearly a kilo in weight and unflustered by the minor disruption to its meal. Its pinkish tail switching across her throat, Wire grabs the rat with both hands and with her thumbs she probes the creature’s vibrating cranium. Sinking her thumbnails into the rat’s eyeballs, she pops them inward like pair of pomegranate seeds.

A weepy shriek, and the rat spins off. There are dozens more rats swarming all over her, so Wire surges and vaults to her feet with a primeval snarl. Vermin drop off her in a dark sheet and she lurches left, collapsing into a mound of cabbage trimmings. She crawls backward on the steamy rot as four additional rats burrowed high in her yellow jumper tumble out and across her bare feet.

Wire’s hand goes instinctively for her waist.

No gun. Fuck.

The disappointment of being unarmed is crushing. Picking herself up, she reels from side to side down a smoke-strewn alley, the pack of rats trailing gleefully behind.

Howls of laughter above, and Wire looks up into an unwholesome revolution of dark faces. Beneath a hot, pearly cervical scar of sky and sagging laundry lines, slum dwellers—brown-skinned old women, deformed men, and children with hand-rolled chemical cigarettes chomped in snaggle-toothed mouths—laugh. They point fingers at her as they lean their scrawny bodies out of holes cut into stacked, rust-ribbed shipping containers. The alley is a nest of vermin itself, chock-full of the marginally re-cived and Indonesian damned.

Wire blunders ahead and soon the rats following lose interest in her. A hundred meters up ahead, the alley intersects with a larger road and Wire runs toward the gap. There’s something wrong with her right eye, and she blinks to clear her vision, but the dull fog does not improve. A glass bottle hits her square in the back and shatters.

Reaching the mouth of the alley, Wire checks herself. In addition to no shoes on her gnawed feet, her pockets are empty. No credits, nothing save for the itchy, undersized jumper given to her back on The Sixty. A throbbing ache in her jaw telegraphs an additional misery. Using her tongue to probe, she realizes some enterprising scum has pried loose two of her molar fillings. She lifts a hand to the side of her skull, and it becomes apparent why her vision is muddled. The surface hardware of her ocular implant has been pried free and, like cacti needles, raw frays of ripped-out filaments barb outward.

A few meters in front of her and on her immediate right there’s a dwarf pushing a bamboo cart on vulcanized rubber tires. The dwarf’s head is strikingly disproportionate to the rest of his small body, and his tattooed skull is speckled with a raised paisley pattern. Laden with sealed packages of homemade candied foodstuffs and several tiered racks of multicolored tubes of super-tea, the cart is an oasis. Wire sways forward and grabs a tube of tea. She twists off the tube’s cap and gulps all the warm liquid down as the dwarf barks.

Wire studies the raised paisley pattern on the dwarf’s head: a shark and a crocodile circling each other in a dance of death.

Wire finishes her super-tea and looks around. The larger thoroughfare at the intersection amounts to a street market in full swing: a sweltering bedlam of marquees, makeshift stalls, and oily dung fires that run as far as she can see. Merchandise of all kinds. Reed rugs, repurposed electronics, bone bracelets, pickled baby fire lizards in huge translucent flagons, and hundreds of oversized baskets of rice. The choked ambiance is predatory and chaotic, and suddenly the dwarf gives Wire’s hip a hard push. The hell if she understands the charmless, clickety vowels juddering from his toothy pie-hole, but Wire makes a motion that she’s willing to pay for her tea and then drapes a hand around her back like she’s going for a wallet. The dwarf grins expectantly.

Wire lets go of the empty tea tube, swings a
shutō-uchi
strike and breaks three cervical vertebrae in the dwarf’s neck. Like a puppet cut loose from his strings, the small man shrivels to the ground.

Wire’s earlier appraisal of the market’s nature is right on the money.

No one cares.

She reaches down and hauls the dwarf up by his soggy armpits. The man’s unctuous frame is heavier than she expects, but Wire sits him on the edge of the bamboo cart without his body toppling over. Wire pats his cheekbones a few times, mimicking an effort to rouse him as if he’s just fainted and then ransacks his pockets. In a right pocket, she finds an electronic credit receiver and a satchel of fiber coins. Wire sets these items aside on the cart’s ledge, and searching the dwarf’s threadbare morning coat she discovers a cheap leather purse. When Wire draws back the talon zipper on the purse a crystal cube the size of a shot glass is activated and rises in the air. Within the cube there’s an image revolving in a three hundred and sixty degree spin—a sickly woman and two children. It’s a family portrait keepsake, and the soft, hollow notes of a bonang kettle can be heard.

Wire stuffs the cube back in the leather purse and discards it under the cart. Lifting the dwarf from the cart’s edge, she looks for a place nearby to dispose of his body. She sees a pile of wooden pallets being broken down by a man who feeds the split pallet pieces into a fire. Wire props the dwarf against the pile of pallets, and the man doesn’t give her a second glance as he cracks another board over his knee.

Wire takes up the cart’s cloth-wrapped crossbar. As she pushes forward into the market throngs, her mind races—thinking:
priorities.

First, she needs to access her personal credit accounts and data stores, and fast. The dwarf’s fiber coins, his electronic credit receiver, plus all the merchandise on his cart should be more than enough to score her a basic ocular implant repair at a tech bodega, so she starts scanning the area for someone to lay the cart’s merchandise off on. Once she gets her ocular back online and accesses her personal accounts, getting the rest of her immediate needs fulfilled should be a snap. Not far ahead, she makes out a clutch of people crowded around a street auctioneer. From the assorted wares being put up for bid, the auctioneer’s circle seems a good place to start.

Second priority: medical attention. Rat bites equal infection, and who knows how long she had been left to die in that alley, or how long those noxious, greasy rodents had been feasting on her. With the ulcerating lacerations up and down her shins, she envisions viruses and whole seeping cultures of grotesque bacteria. Tasting the gash on her lip where the big one took its last taste before she blinded it, Wire shudders. Definitely a full clinical work up. Complete transfusions, arterial scrub, and super-sized antibiotic-vitamin cocktail to get her back on the mend. After that Wire pictures a long, disinfectant drench in a bath. Food might go a long way toward helping her deplorable state too, and her stomach burbles when she catches a whiff of garlicky bats frying in a nearby stall. Wire can’t remember the last time she ate. Britch refused to feed her on The Sixty, so it’s been more than a couple of days since her last good caloric intake.

Third and fourth priorities: clean clothes and a place to rest. After all she has been through, splurging on a first-rate hotel is a must. Room service with secure uplink amenities so she can scour her networks and see who the hell swings the big stick in this Surabayan hell hole. A soft bed sounds like a dream. A mini bar, heaven.

Of course, the rest of her priorities are pretty clear after that.

Get armed.

Get mobile.

Get Martstellar.

When she comes round, the first thing Koko notices is a dim mosaic of lights overhead, row after row of alternating slates arranged like a massive chessboard. Realizing instantly she’s strapped down from head to toe, Koko is definitely in no mood for games.

As she struggles against her restraints, somewhere off and down past her feet a dog barks three times. Koko figures it must be the blue synthetic that accompanied the group that saved her and Flynn, keeping an eye on her. The lights above grow bright and a door opens. She hears the hushed sound of rubber twisting on a tiled floor, followed by a doglike whine and heavy panting.

“Gammy, wait outside.”

Trotting claws and the door closes. A second later there’s the empty slap of an electrified latch.

“Ah, you’re awake,” a man says. “Good, that’s good. Would you like a drink of water?”

A mechanism is engaged and whatever Koko is strapped to hums beneath her. Gradually, she’s raised up in suspension, and when she catches her reflection in some tinted glass across the way she sees her clothes are gone and she’s dressed in a cropped paper examination gown, trussed up like Frankenstein’s monster.

Koko’s bloodshot eyes roam the room. Handled glass-faced cabinets, two glowing projection screens that look to be running her vitals, and an assortment of additional chirring apparatus that all but scream medical facility. She recalls how earlier the group that rescued her and Flynn said they needed to take them to the infirmary, so Koko assumes that’s where she’s being held. A bleachy smell of disinfectant cuts through the crust in her nose.

Near the door, a man with long, graying hair stands. Early fifties or late forties, he’s super lean and has the reserved, nonchalant look of someone who’s used to being in charge. Dressed in a loose almost tan kurta-like tunic V-ed at the neck, and tough canvas pants stuffed into plain black boots, he wears numerous bracelets around his wrists and appears to be unarmed. The man moves forward and holds out a square, light-blue plastic container, its top pierced with a straw.

“I said, would you like a drink of water?”

Koko just stares.

The man continues, “First off, I want you to know that you are safe. We regret having to use restraints, but I’m told you put up quite a fight earlier. Not exactly appreciative behavior to those who’ve saved you. Two of those you attacked have subdural hematomas and hairline skull fractures. Dr. Corella relayed your diagnostics and confirmed right cranial scarring area consistent with ocular implant technology. From this I must assume you are or were once a soldier.”

Koko blinks once and says nothing.

The man shakes the plastic container again. “Water?”

Running her tongue over her chapped lips, Koko licks a niggling cold sore and thinks,
When was the last time I had fresh water? Two days ago?
Her circadian rhythms are all screwed up, it might be longer. Her mouth tastes like it’s been dabbed dry with sour cotton. She’s so thirsty. Reluctantly, she nods.

The man treads forward slowly until he positions himself on her immediate right. With care, he lowers the straw to her lips and Koko draws hard. To say the liquid tastes better than kissing the astral plane would be an insult to the delusion of poets. Pure, distilled, and iodized perhaps, but then again—you never know about such things. The water could be contaminated. Koko’s bodily needs trample her suspicions like a rodeo clown. She sucks greedily until the container splutters hollow.

So thirsty.

The man steps back, pulls up a caster-based stool, and sits.

“Call me old-fashioned, but I think it’s best to start with introductions. My name is Sébastien Maxx and here are the facts. Your submarine wrecked on a restricted coastal area. By restricted I mean this place is located along the northwestern portion of the North American prohibs, and there’s no good reason anyone on Earth should even be coming remotely close to these coordinates. If you cooperate, we’re in a position to assist you. We mean neither you nor your companion any harm. Now then, I’ll allow you a chance to speak. Can you tell me your name?”

Koko rolls her eyes upward and remains silent.

“All right, can you at least tell me where you’re from?”

Koko licks her lips. “Well, hold on, let me think. Oh, yeah, now I remember. I’m from a little place called fuck off, ever hear of it?”

The man calling himself Sébastien presents an unruffled, tolerant gaze.

“Look, the storm you two just survived was gargantuan. We’ve been aware of this massive low-pressure system’s approach for days, and the fact that you came through it in one piece is nothing short of astounding. Even now the storm’s effects are producing a number of offshore waterspouts. You want to be glib? You want to be hostile? Fine, but make no mistake: you are both lucky to be alive.”

“Is that so?”

“It is. And the man with you, while he’s out of danger now, was very close to death.”

Koko’s brow crinkles.

Oh, hell—Flynn.

“Where is he?” Koko asks.

Sébastien shakes the empty water container. “Nearby. The wound in his leg has spread severe sepsis throughout his body and may have gone so far as to affect his cognitive functions, but is now being treated aggressively.”

“Aggressively? Aggressively by who?”

“Trust me, he’s in good hands.”

“I don’t trust anyone. Doctors especially.”

“A common sentiment.”

“So where the hell are we?”

“Our infirmary. This facility is part of the Commonage.”

Koko blows out a breath and closes her eyes. “That means nothing to me.”

“Nevertheless, it is where you happen to be.”

Pulling together her best weapons-grade stare, Koko opens her eyes.

“Listen,
fuckstick
—”

“Sébastien.”

“Listen, fuckstick.
If you consider a beating heart essential, untie me and take me to see my friend
now
.”

Sébastien tsks. “I promise, you’ll see him in time, but first things first, all right? I need specifics. Why have you come here? Are you from a corporate alliance? What are your objectives in the area?”

The water has loosened Koko’s throat up, but her mouth is still gummy. She wants more water and could drink a couple of gallons without pause if she had the chance, but she resists asking for it.