by Kieran Shea
Why oh why don’t they just let me be?
When Flynn’s spine twists in a way it was never designed to, his eyes fly open with pure anguish. Half awake, he realizes he’s no longer in the submarine and is now being battered around on the cold, slippery steel of the outer hull. Such powerful deluges of water, so ceaseless. Flynn closes his eyes again and lets the groping hands take him. Stubby fingers pulling his shivering meat away in foaming water. Fingers pry open one of his eyelids and a fluid sweep of a light like a comet’s trail scorches his retina and is gone.
A granule of brackish grit forces another vicious coughing jag, and Flynn perceives a face close to his own. For one last time, he dares a look and sees bright green irises, frazzled with exhaustion and worry. A perfect, sweet little nose…
Koko?
“Flynn, we made it!”
Koko… Kooookkkkk—
A smart smack across his cheek. Then another. And another.
“Don’t you die on me, you son of a bitch! Don’t you dare die on me! Hang on!”
Hang on? Hang on to what?
To this?
This sucks.
SÉBASTIEN MAXX
Propped up on his bed and stripped to the waist, Sébastien Maxx is listening to the raging winds outside his shuttered windows, when a series of quick knocks jerks him free of his thoughts.
The knocking is at the outer door of Sébastien’s adjoining office. Fastidiously arranged and painted stark white, the larger adjacent area connects to his darker and more masculine appointed bedroom through a set of French-styled glass doors. Sébastien gets up, plucks his pale-brown tunic from the foot of the bed, and hauls it on.
“Just a moment…”
Now that he’s answered, Sébastien takes his time arranging himself. It’s nice to know that whoever is at the door would gladly wait one minute, one hour, one day if he so requested, because such is his cachet as the Commonage’s alleged leader. After tossing back a mane of long, graying hair, he fastens the top button on his pants and crosses into his office in socked feet. With a finger swipe in the air, he kills the power feeding the blue projection screens at his desk and then switches on a floor lamp. Driven rain crackles against the room’s shuttered windows. As Sébastien opens the door with a brisk snap, he prays whoever is calling is delivering good news.
Stout and lean like a pair of Greco-Roman wrestlers, two identical men in red ponchos stand just outside the door. It’s Eirik and Bonn, colloquially referred to at the Commonage as “the twins.” Their ponchos drip and Eirik, always the more confident of the two, is the first to speak.
“Our apologies for disturbing you, Sébastien, but the search party returned ten minutes ago.”
Sébastien jogs his head once before turning around and moving toward his desk. After settling in a heavy wooden chair, he laces his fingers on his chest and sits back to absorb their report.
“I trust the search party was successful,” Sébastien says.
Eirik looks briefly at Bonn and then back at Sébastien.
“I’m sorry, but something terrible happened. It’s Kumari… She’s dead.”
The revelation is a nitrous-sharp shock. He sits forward, grasping the arms of his chair.
What? No—the search party had their instructions. They were supposed to subdue Kumari, bring her discreetly back to the Commonage… but dead? How could this be?
“Dear God, what the hell happened?”
“She fell.”
“Fell? From what? Where?”
“The cliffs along the ocean just beyond the ruins,” Eirik replies. “We were close, but something went wrong. We lost her before we could pull her to safety. I’m sorry.”
Laboring to assemble his thoughts, Sébastien drops his head into his hands.
“Where is she now?”
“Her body is downstairs in the infirmary. We woke Dr. Corella when we returned, and he has her. The doctor advised us to inform you immediately.”
Sébastien leans forward and places his hands flush on the desk. “Please tell me Kumari’s parents haven’t been notified.”
“No, Dr. Corella thought it best that you saw her first.”
Sébastien’s eyes ping back and forth. Drawing in a deep lungful of air, he stands and swallows the hot bulge building in his throat.
“Thank you,” he says quietly. “You two can go now. Tell Dr. Corella I need a few minutes. This, my God. I can’t believe it. Kumari is dead? I don’t want to believe it.”
Eirik takes a step. “There’s something else too. There’s been a shipwreck.”
“A shipwreck? Where? When?”
“Below the cliffs. The wreck occurred when we were trying to reach Kumari.”
“But out here? Impossible.”
“No, it’s true. We don’t know if it’s commercial or militarized, but it’s a fusion-powered submarine. It came in from the southwest.”
“Are there survivors?”
Eirik nods vigorously. “Just two,” he says. “A man and a woman, and the man is in bad shape. The female survivor, she attacked some people down in the infirmary when we returned. Dr. Corella has her sedated and Gammy is guarding her.”
“Did you say attacked?”
“There were injuries.”
Sébastien gets up and quickly moves around his desk. He steams toward his bedroom.
“Tell Dr. Corella I’m on my way. I want you two and anyone connected to the search party to assemble in the infirmary and wait there until I arrive. No exceptions. I want to debrief everyone. We need to figure out what happened and who these survivors are before the whole Commonage loses their heads.”
Sébastien returns from his bedroom with a pair of laceless black boots. He drops into his desk chair again and pulls the boots on one after the other and then lifts his eyes.
“What’re you waiting for?”
Eirik adjusts his posture. “Well, the search party also detected some unusual movement on their way out to find Kumari. It seems a band of de-civ migrants have taken up a position deep within the woods beyond the western edge of the Commonage.”
Boots now on, Sébastien sits back in his chair. “How many?”
“A few dozen, maybe more. It was hard to get an accurate read, but it might be a larger group. The encampment is set up about a kilometer from here.”
Sébastien waves a hand, indicating this additional information, while troubling, is not a priority.
“We’ve had de-civ transients cross through the area before. They’ve probably just been caught off guard and got disoriented by the storm. God, Kumari is dead, a shipwreck, and migrants? Let’s take one crisis at a time, shall we? What time is it?”
“A little after three A.M.”
Sébastien turns and listens to the wind outside again. “The models indicate the storm should be dying down soon. My bet is these de-civs will probably move on when the weather clears, but please keep me apprised if their status changes. I want a second search party ready to go back to this sub’s wreck within the hour. We need to see what’s what.”
The two brothers bow and leave, closing the door behind them.
Sébastien drags a finger through the air and activates his projection screens. He cues up his personal communication links, and with several additional hand motions enlarges four sub-screens on his arrays. With a clawed hand he expands several satellite charts, checking the storm’s present direction and rotation. His previous assessment of the weather’s ebbing strength is accurate. The extended front shows dissipation and the storm is heading inland. He checks the surrounding area’s offshore restriction measures, and is disturbed to discover that, because of the storm’s intensity, there was a minor fluctuation in offshore communication uplinks. The break jibes perfectly with the timing of the wreck. Furious, he addresses his systems out loud.
“Priority assimilation of all known submersible crafts worldwide: commercial, private, and militarized with complete breakdown of onboard schematics. Addendums: retrieve a listing o
f all distress transponder communications filtered for the northern Pacific region for the past seventy-two hours before storm manifestation to present. Realign all and confirm all offshore and air-space restrictions.”
SURABAYA, INDONESIA I
THE DEPORTATION SUCK
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.
THE COMMONAGE II
WAKEY, WAKEY
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 massi
ve 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.
