by Kieran Shea
“Now’s as good a time as any.”
Together they cross a series of zig-zagging ramps down to the docks. A maintenance technician spots them approaching and instantly Koko sizes the man up. Tall and ropey, he carries himself a bit too heavily to his right side, which to Koko means the big galoot favors it. The tech caustically starts spouting meaningless words of how it’s a restricted area and they don’t belong there, and Koko screams at him in a strange foreign tongue. The tech is so startled by Koko’s outburst, he falters and steps back clumsily. It’s what Koko intended; get him off balance. She charges and lands a haymaker right into the tech’s temple. Tottering, the galoot fights back with a series of wild hooks, but Koko slaps away each blow and uses a three-punch cross and kick combination to drop him to the dock. She shoves Flynn toward the submarines bobbing in the quay.
“Which one?” Flynn cries.
Koko points to the largest winged submarine tied to the dock pilings directly ahead of them.
“There, the one with the open hatch. Take the gangway.”
Gingerly and quickly as he can, Flynn limps ahead and makes his way up the gangway. Koko has the bounty agent’s weapon drawn and she checks the periphery. More technicians have noticed the ruckus and are headed their way. Someone hits an alarm, and an earsplitting horn screeches.
Koko aims and opens fire at the surrounding electrical cables and delivery conduits, anything that might short out or explode. Like schoolchildren on a bee-streaked playground, the advancing techs scatter. Flynn is struggling his way into the sub’s open hatch.
“Hurry, Flynn!”
“I’m trying!”
There’s no time for niceties. Koko leaps onto the gangway and storms up to the hatch. Planting a boot on Flynn’s shoulder she forces him down inside. Flynn falls and lands spread-eagled on the deck below with a loud OOOF!
“Sorry, baby!”
Koko drops the bug-out packs on top of him, one by one, climbs in, and pulls the hatch closed. Spinning a wheel to lock the hatch off, she can hear muddled footsteps and shouts above her. When Koko looks at Flynn, she sees he’s passed out.
She steps over him. Truth be told, Koko has never set foot on a submarine and hasn’t the first clue about how to run one. All manner of flight craft and armored land vehicles, maybe a few amphibious watercraft now and then, but a submarine? Never. Her brain zips briskly through ephemeral, fragmentary notions. Something to do with positive and negative buoyancies and hydroplanes. She ducks under a riveted seam and makes her way to the sub’s small bridge. As she’s slipping into the vessel’s pilot seat, a round yellow button marked POWER looks promising, so she jabs at it. There is a sharp click and then the submarine’s powerful fusion engines roar to life.
Crap, Koko thinks, I didn’t have time to cast off the dock lines. Oh, well.
Running her eyes over the controls, Koko grabs what looks like the throttle and slams it forward. The lurch from the stern is explosive, and the sub rips free of the dock in a shattering opus of destruction.
When Koko glances out the thick, bathyscaphic bow screen in front of her, one of the shouting technicians from above tumbles off the hull and falls into the water. Tugging back on the throttle, Koko throws a quick look back at Flynn. He still looks passed out, but she shouts at him anyway.
“Hang on!”
Chugging up and onto a plane, the submarine careens across the open water. Koko suddenly realizes that the only way out of the subterranean docking area is down. She needs to figure out the vessel’s submersion functions and hydroplanes, like, fast.
On the sub’s steering wheel there are two green- and red-colored toggles. Green and red mean starboard and port, right? Koko flicks the toggles, but there’s no response. The far vertical wall of the cavernous docking space looms closer so she starts hitting and flipping every lever and button in sight. One of the levers blows the ballast and auxiliary trim tanks and after a loud, whisking hiss a full sluicing chorus of rushing water follows. The sub descends.
Oh, man… maybe it’s like flying?
No time for second guesses because they’re about to slam into the far wall. Koko pushes the helm’s wheel forward and miraculously the winged sub enters a sharp thirty-degree dive.
“Whoo-hoo! Now we’re talking!”
Outside, a bubbling suffusion of seawater rushes over the bow screen. Through the bubbles Koko can make out yellow directional lighting leading down a long, wide tunnel, and up ahead a large algae-covered sign with yellow letters reads:
EASTERN PACIFIC
Koko eases back the helm, and the sub sways from side to side. Leveling out their angle and reaching neutral buoyancy, she notches up their speed. Five hundred meters ahead a wide ovate exit soon becomes visible, hooped with flashing white signal lights.
It’s funny, but Koko suddenly remembers that old story about a fisherman being swallowed by a great fish-beast.
Great fish-beast?
The great fish-beast can kiss her ass.
Koko slams the throttle forward for all its worth.
KEEPING A LIVE WIRE DOWN
Hours later, stripped and humiliated, bounty agent Jackie Wire leans her muscled, naked buttocks against the pressure cell’s far wall and crosses her meaty arms. The invisible force fields in the pressure cell strain the limits of her vascular system. Bulging blue veins, thick as baby snakes, rope her skin.
In a teal-tinted hologram in front of her, a portly security officer looks on, the edges of his mouth curving slightly.
“We can’t keep you indefinitely.”
Within the hologram the officer’s dimensions are half life-sized, but his plump face broadcasts a certain slovenliness and has an extra dash of under-my-thumb officiousness. Pritch or Britch was what he said his name was. Officer Fatty might be merited with some kind of rank, but Wire pegs him as unequivocally bush league. With a slight swerve of her eyeball she records the man’s butterball features on her ocular imbed for future reference. Pulling this intimidation garbage and wasting her valuable time—it’s a small world, buddy. Given half the chance down the line, Wire would gladly take a measure out of her busy schedule to quietly choke the fat man to death.
“So, if you can’t keep me, when do I get released?”
A measured pause. “In a little.”
“In a little? Like, in a little what? A few hours? Days? By my count you’ve had me locked up in this cell for almost three hours straight, and that’s after I woke up. Look, pal, you obviously know why I came to The Sixty so let’s quit dicking around. I know my rights.”
“No doubt you do,” the holographic officer coos. “As a bounty agent, I’d think knowing the variances of your rights would be a priority for you in most parts of the world. But see, the Custom Pleasure Bureau and The Sixty have deemed your detention appropriate as you’re in breach of your reservation agreement.”
“My reservation agreement?”
“Yes, the one you authorized upon your arrival.”
“You can’t impede someone from engaging in her chosen field of commerce.”
“I’m sorry, but I think we can. ‘All commercial activities or business transactions by patrons within The Sixty must be disclosed and have prior CPB approval.’ Neat trick having a subaqueous spider-bot deliver your contraband weapons ahead of your arrival. Very proactive.”
Wire hocks back a long draw of phlegm, swallows it, and lets her eyes roam over the pressure cell’s barren walls. It’s not the first pressure cell she’s been in, but this one seems to be a new-fangled model, its atmospheric stresses specifically designed to inflict significant discomfort. Typically for someone of fewer physical attributes, such measures would keep a person sapped of strength and whimpering on the floor. Of course it took Wire some work to get her five-foot frame upright, and even more effort to fold her powerful arms, but she wants Mister Third Helping of Carbohydrates to know she’s not a pushover.
The holographic officer buzzes on insufferably. “You stated you entered the
host establishment with the intent of terminating Koko Martstellar, to collect on an outstanding Ultimate Sanction elimination warrant. While the initiators of this contract are no longer with the CPB—or living, for that matter—I understand these sort of bids are irrevocable and rewarded with accrued interest.”
“So what’s it to you?”
“Well, by now the payout on this bounty must be quite substantial. Perhaps you should have exercised discretion and waited until your intended target was off The Sixty.”
Wire hangs her head and concentrates on the space between her spread feet. Sweat drips from her body as she replays how the whole debacle with Martstellar went down.
After pursuing Martstellar on a residential barge in the lower firmamental orbits of the Second Free Zone with two other bounty operatives (both of whom Martstellar killed), Wire cut her losses and hightailed it out of SFZ altogether. Called it a day and chalked up the anomaly of missing her target to a loss. Sometimes, at least in her profession, you had to play the self-preservation card. The feed publicity surrounding the Second Free Zone fiasco had pretty much iced pursuing Martstellar for a little while anyway, so to keep herself occupied after abandoning her assignment Wire reprioritized. She took a secondary recovery job in the Rhodope mountain region with a follow-up elimination stint in nearby Bucharest. It was a safe enough play. Keep working while the heat surrounding Martstellar cooled down. Both job assignments ate up months of her time, and after Wire finished up, she almost even forgot about finding Martstellar altogether. However, a routine skim of backchannel intelligence revealed that Martstellar was still alive and the Ultimate Sanction status on her head was still collectible. The news just pissed Wire off all over again. Being bested by that has-been, it wasn’t something she could stomach. No way, no how. Wire had a reputation, a nearly pluperfect capture/liquidation record. If word got around that she’d bailed on a second-rate target like Martstellar, Wire might soon find herself being passed over for additional gainful work.
She has to concede it was a bit of a conundrum why Martstellar ended up back on The Sixty. You’d think after your supposed superior engages a directive to wipe your mortal being off the face of the planet you’d choose some other locale rather than the terra firma that left a bad taste in your mouth. Not so. The spunky little scamp apparently got off on the resort’s dissolute mode de vie. With some additional investigation, Wire learned that after Martstellar settled the score with the woman who had put out her kill order (quite the spectacular shoot-out, or so Wire had heard), she ended up cutting a deal with the CPB and The Sixty. Got herself set up with a whole new arrangement. A top-shelf saloon with a demimonde bill of meretricious sex hustlers, gambling options, and even a lap pool. Yeah, her and that gangly dork who’d helped her elude Wire in the first place. A former sky-cop Wire now knows goes by the name Jedidiah Flynn.
A second teal-tinted hologram larger in dimension appears in the air alongside the heavyset officer’s image. The second display runs an edited playback from camerascope receptors placed in and around Martstellar’s establishment. Expressionless, Wire studies the playback like the most cringeworthy of dreams.
First, she sees herself with her HK U-50 drawn as she exits the brush and heads toward the building. The playback then smash-cuts to assorted voyeuristic angles (above, ground-level, behind, and so forth) all of which take in her swift and deadly approach. The recording then cuts to a fish-eyed overhead view of the saloon as she enters. Wire relishes the next part when she pops the man called Flynn in the back of his leg with a pulse round, but what Wire sees next sickens her. Like a glockenspiel figurine, a skinny young man in shiny gold shorts smashes a huge glass jug right over her head. Wire wants to review what happened next as she was down for the count, but the second display darkens and disappears.
“You’d think with your track record you would’ve been, I don’t know, less brazen? That young man who knocked you out? His record indicates multiple arrests for pub brawling back in Melbourne before he was recruited by Martstellar.”
Wire seethes. “Brilliant. Taken out by some shabby-ass, Aussie boywhore.”
“Tut-tut. Here on The Sixty we now refer to them as release specialists.”
“Spare me the semantics. So, what’s the story here? Am I being charged with something or what?”
“Well, in the midst of your recent escapade you did shoot one of our employees.”
“Oh, come off it. Replay that footage. I only winged that guy. I bet he’s doing just fine. Besides, I was just getting warmed up.”
The image of the officer starts to weaken, and it seems he is getting ready to sign off, playing more of his sly power games.
“Hey! Hold on, you didn’t answer my question.”
The hologram strengthens. “We’re trying to keep this incident under wraps, so no, you’re not being charged, not exactly.”
Not exactly?
“All right, so when exactly do I get released?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow? Swell. Then what?”
“Deportation from The Sixty Islands, officially.”
“Deportation to where?”
“Surabaya. You’ll be housed in the brig on a short-haul flight craft, I believe.”
“But I don’t know anyone in Surabaya.”
“Whether you know anyone there is not of concern.”
“Yeah, but couldn’t you, like, I don’t know. Pick someplace else?”
“Come, come, it’s not the worst place to be deported to. Did you know Surabaya was once known as the City of Heroes?”
“What about all my gear?”
“You mean the weapons Martstellar didn’t take? Those have been confiscated. A subsection of the aforementioned reservation agreement outlines property forfeitures. Zero reimbursement, I’m afraid.”
At last the pressure cell’s measures take their toll and cream Wire to the floor. The impact on the smooth concrete is jarring, but now that she’s down the potent unseen energies sense her movement and grow stronger in intensity. Wire pants and grinds her teeth. Her brain might burst from her ears like runny pudding, but she wills herself to focus.
“Wait, is Martstellar… still here? On The Sixty?”
The officer runs the tip of his tongue over his thick lips as if tasting the mist of possibility.
“That sort of information might require a small measure of recompense, don’t you think?”
Wire tracks the officer’s image as it repositions in the air above her. Her head whanging like an unholy gong, it takes a few more seconds for his greasy innuendo to sink in.
Figures.
Everybody has his price.
WAY DOWN BELOW THE OCEAN
SEA MONKEYING
Surfing the Kuroshio Current like a pro into the greater clockwork coil of the North Pacific Gyre, Koko is in the midst of getting a few quick Z’s when the submarine pitches hard to starboard. Like a flashing seraphic eye, a red bulb blinks at her on the forward console.
Making certain all the onboard tracking capabilities were disabled, seeing to Flynn’s wound and securing him in a makeshift bunk fashioned out of a dropdown bench had Koko wiped, so she’d engaged the helm’s autopilot in order to catch a nap. Koko chides herself for being so stupid. Still at maximum speed, the submarine has now hit something, and somewhere along the starboard side an unhealthy tremolo wails.
Koko kills the power to the sub’s engines, and a profound silence descends. An immediate diagnostic check discloses that the sub has entered a large, underwater debris field and has thusly been snagged. With a depth reading of a little over twenty-seven fathoms, everything outside the dense bow screen is ominously dark, but pulling up and reviewing additional vessel analytics, Koko is able to pinpoint the problem: a floating cable jamming one of the starboard-side rudders.
Shitballs.
This is all she needs.
Whenever Koko has encountered mechanical issues (be it a finicky weapon or even a clogged privy) she’s found
that generally a quick, targeted shot of brute force can solve most problems. Engaging the power to the engines again, she throws the sub into reverse to see if a short redirection can free the cable from the rudder. Sliding backward, at first her fix seems to do the trick, but then another hard listing rocks and the terrible starboard tremolo sounds off yet again. Koko shifts the throttle back to neutral, and sighing heavily she kills the power to the engines once more.
Oh, man…
She dreads it, but knows what she has to do.
She needs to free the cable manually.
Unbuckling her safety harness, Koko heads aft and stops briefly to lay the back of her hand across Flynn’s forehead. Feverish and a small mercy, Flynn is completely out, so Koko presses two fingers along his neck to check his pulse. His heartbeat is shallow but steady, so being careful not to wake him, she squeezes herself past him and into the engine-access area. Freeing a latch on a port-side locker, Koko drags out a heavy bag full of scuba equipment and returns to the center area of the sub.
It’s been ages since she’s gone full frog. Underwater infil/exfil techniques, egress methods, months of underwater NOYFB† demolition training; it’s not as if she’s uninitiated to the rigors of diving, and thankfully the underwater gear stowed in the heavy bag looks top-notch. Two full cylinders with eighteen liters of compressed air, weight belts, gloves, fins, masks, and a variety of secondary tools, regulators, and gauges. Sadly, the two wetsuits included with the bag are shorties—skinned flimsy at a meager two millimeters for tropical temps. With her legs and arms half covered, Koko knows she’s going to be a virtual popsicle out in the open water, but she hasn’t much choice.
Removing her boots, she strips and hauls on the smaller of the two wetsuits and is pleased to discover it’s a snug fit at least.
Heading further forward to the console, Koko blows the ballast and the sub gradually rises to the surface. A floppy wash of water swishes past the bow screen, and she flicks on the sub’s outside lights. Traipsing back to the gear bag, she pulls on a pair of gloves and cinches a weight belt around her waist.
