Koko the Mighty

by Kieran Shea

  “If you don’t mind me asking, are you two…”

  “What?”

  Dr. Corella lowers his head. “It’s really none of my business.”

  Flynn smiles. “Wow, it’s that obvious, huh?”

  “Well, I had my suspicions.”

  “Koko thinks we’re in a tight spot. She really doesn’t like being here.”

  “No doubt,” Dr. Corella says. “But what about you?”

  “Me?”

  “Yes. I’m curious. How do you feel?”

  “My leg feels almost new.”

  “No, not that. I mean, your leg wound is healing marvelously, right on schedule. But the other thing you just mentioned; do you feel you’re in a tight spot? Humor me. On a sliding scale, tranquility-wise between one and ten, do you feel more at ease? Do you like being here, generally speaking?”

  Flynn looks at the table surface. He has a fitful awareness that he probably should withhold his thoughts and views of himself, but viscerally he senses portions of his willpower giving way. It’s strange, but his mind and body are so relaxed, so mollified, so completely at ease he almost feels outside of himself. For the life of him he can’t remember feeling so profoundly mellow and agreeable. And Dr. Corella? Well, he doesn’t look like the sort of man who’d betray intimacies, so Flynn’s willpower soon disappears completely. Oh, what’s the big deal? Aren’t doctors supposed to do that? Keep a trust and be a confidant with a patient and his secrets? Maybe. Flynn remembers how minutes earlier he felt substantially troubled by how he flubbed keeping things close to the vest and divulged quite off-handedly to Dr. Corella a few of his previous experiences as security deputy back up in the Second Free Zone. Flynn had to stop himself, knowing Koko would be livid with him for telling the doctor anything, but now it seems he doesn’t care one way or the other. Anyway, Dr. Corella was so nonplussed by his babbling hubbub, and during their talk he’s been genuine with all his concerns. It’s like they’re old friends.

  “Uh, yeah, sure,” Flynn answers. “I don’t know. I tell you what, though, what you and Sébastien have shared, how you’re choosing to build a way of living that’s rational and sane out here, one could do worse. So ease? Yeah, sure. This place feels pretty grounded to me.”

  Dr. Corella smiles. “Grounded is a very good word. And how about content? Again, on a scale from one to ten.”

  “Right now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe a nine?”

  “Splendid.”

  Neither of them say anything for a minute. Flynn finishes his water and then leans his arms across the table, open palmed.

  “I know you’re busy man, Doc, and I want to thank you for saving my life. The staff here, Sébastien, even though you don’t know anything about us and even with Koko’s outrageous behavior, you’ve helped. In this day and age, that means a lot.”

  “You’re welcome. I swore an oath.”

  “Oh, yeah, that hippo thing, right?”

  Dr. Corella shifts forward. “Primum non nocere, the Hippocratic oath, correct. But it’s not just that, Flynn. It’s much more. It’s something that maybe Koko, because of her background and how she was bred for combat, is incapable of accepting. You see, Flynn, with specific guidance Commonagers here have successfully adapted to a model of how life was designed to be. Not an arrangement based on commerce, stratified beliefs, waffling loyalties or appalling states of anomie—they’ve taken to the responsibilities of a community. They’ve chosen a new path.”

  “Tough stand to take considering the rest of the world.”

  “Perhaps at first, but adjusting to such a path is quite easy if only with a certain… nudge. If you don’t mind me saying, I think you’re responding so well to it all because you were once a policeman.”

  Flynn laughs. “I guess I took an oath too.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah. Uphold order and keep the peace, courtesy and regard for everyone, and blah, blah, blah. Seems sort of ridiculous now.”

  Dr. Corella’s smile broadens. “You know what? I think that now you’re better you should allow me to show you around and introduce you to some people here. Would you like that?”

  The doctor’s invitation feels irresistible, and a conflation of exhilarated sensations expands and fills Flynn’s body. A state of giving over subjugates his sense of self like a warm, reassuring film, but strangely it feels okay, moreover, right.

  “You know, that sounds pretty great,” Flynn replies. “I think I’d like that very, very much.”

  CRUSOE-IN’

  Just after a hazy, rotten yolk spread of dawn, Wire douses her fire, deflates and stashes the life raft, and starts picking her way south in the direction of the last known coordinates of the stolen submarine.

  All along the shoreline, it’s slow going. There are huge rocks, clotted tidal impasses, obscene nests of garbage in tangled clumps. Plastics of all shapes and sizes seemingly everywhere. With each section she traverses, she carefully examines all corners and blind spots, above and behind her, before she advances. Sensibly, she takes things a hundred meters at a time. Now in the Nor’Am prohibs, this is not the time to play things slack, but it feels great to be moving again.

  Rounding a cove shortly before thirteen hundred hours, Wire finally tastes gravy. Latched on a grouping of barnacled boulders like a gigantic amoeba, the turtled submarine sits just ahead. She takes cover behind a washed-up steel kettledrum two hundred meters north of the vessel.

  Waiting for signs of life, she gives her study of the submarine and the surrounding area a patient half hour. No movement, no smoke, no sounds except for a few wheeling gulls alighting on the hull and rocks. Employing the enlargement functions on her ocular, Wire surveys the area for potential tripwires and booby traps. She deliberates whether she should wait until dark to make her move, but anxiousness trumps her reservations. She might as well get on with it. Daylight is precious, and she might need it.

  Wire psyches herself up, scurries around the kettledrum, and advances on the wreck. In her head, she hears her own assertive boom.

  Move! Move! Move!

  Wire covers the distance in less than thirty seconds, stumbles once, and flattens the heft of her body near the sub’s astern hydroplanes. After catching her breath, she picks up a handful of loose gravel and tosses the pebbles onto the hull. She listens and counts off thirty, but there’s not a clang, not a rustle or peep from inside.

  Finding inverted footholds in the sub’s flank, she quickly climbs up top and approaches the blown hatch near the bow area, Sig out in a two-handed grip.

  “Yoo-hoo, anybody home?”

  Nothing. Not a sound.

  Wire drops down on her belly and shimmies forward. After giving herself another short count, she then sticks the Sig down the open hatch and squeezes off three quick pulse rounds and pulls back.

  Still nothing.

  Huh, guess I’m going in.

  A quick sweep of the vessel’s innards using the torch function on her multi-tool illuminates a harrowing tale sticky with unrequited whats, hows, and whys. Given her milieu in combat operations, it does not appear to be a wise move on Martstellar’s part to attempt an amphibious landing during a huge storm as the timeline suggests. What’s more, why come ashore here? Why didn’t Martstellar just crank the diving planes and stay submerged, break out a deck of cards, and wait the bad weather out?

  A couple of scenarios brick together in Wire’s brain. Perhaps Martstellar had no choice but to surface and head for the coast as fast as possible. After all, Wire did shoot her partner in the leg back on The Sixty. Maybe she needed to make up critical time and try for land if that Flynn guy’s condition worsened. A second possibility might be an unforeseen technical issue. Yeah, Martstellar is resourceful with a hell of a skill set, but she certainly is not some seafaring wrench-head. Wire tries to recall some of the training portions of Martstellar’s profile, and she’s fairly certain rock star marine engineering wasn’t part of her abstract. Wire slides the torch
beam across the sub’s hollow, fusty confines. No splashes of blood, but a blown safety hatch? Whatever happened, it seems possible somebody got out of or got into this inverted contraption.

  Wire emerges from the sub and sits on the hull half in and out of the open hatch like a Panzer commander. She regards the waves, the cliffs, and then looks up and down the rocky debris-littered beach north and south. Massive, abraded basalt formations surround the dauntingly steep cove. To her immediate east, the smaller bread-loaf-sized rocks grow larger into formations that slant upward toward a rugged, precipitous rock face with tufted thatches of sea grass. Looking higher just above the cliff edge near the summit, Wire can make out the pointy outlines of green shrubs and trees. The whole shooting match is all so craggy with steep pitches, if the two did escape after they flipped and bellied out, with one of them wounded they would have had their work cut out; higher, drier terrain, ipso facto, would be tantamount to scaling a twelve-story building, and damn near impossible.

  Wire pulls out her toasted coconut protein tarry from her pocket. She peels back the foil wrapping, tears off a large chunk, and chews. Had she been in Martstellar’s position there’s no question what she would have done.

  Cut the dead weight.

  Shoot the wounded.

  She swallows a softened glob in her mouth as another even more distressing storyline weaves together. It might be that after they escaped the sub, Martstellar and Flynn got sucked out to sea and drowned. It’s conceivable. Being forced aground and flipping over like this—it doesn’t take a genius to figure out this was not what one would call a preferred arrival. Who knows what the storm or tidal conditions were at the time they made it to shore. Most likely bad. With the submarine weighing a conservative estimate of thirty-odd tons, even if it were disabled, only a massive ill-timed wave could have caused the catastrophic inversion. Survival after that? Pretty damn dicey.

  Wire wraps up and stashes the rest of her tarry. After setting the multi-tool in her teeth, she drops back down into the sub and does an orangutan hang from the edge. Directing the torch beam with her head, she scans the brackish bilge and consoles and her speculative narrative of possible events thickens further. Several of the electronic modules and consoles are not only water-damaged but gutted. Big spaghetti spills of cables and thrown-open lockers. Fittings and bracing hardware has been pried off.

  Scavengers could explain why the tracking beacon had been briefly reactivated. Maybe somebody found Martstellar and Flynn and rescued them, or worse (please, please not), killed them both and buried their bodies.

  But scavengers out here? In the prohibs? Who? All that equipment, where would they go?

  Wire immediately clambers out of the sub, drops to the beach, and starts looking for signs. All that removed equipment, it was likely heavy stuff. There have to be tracks, and there might even be a quicker way out of here without the climb straight up the cliffs.

  Then Wire sees something. Ten meters above, along a sloped ledge, she sees what looks like a switchback trail carved into the cliff face. The trail is insanely sheer in sections, but portions of it lead upward to a crossover trail. Wire taps her temple to ocular implant enlargement and a bright, painful orb of light mule-kicks her square in the forehead.

  Caterwauling, Wire falls down and rolls across the sand holding her head. The pain is penetratingly sharp and instantly she knows what’s wrong. It’s her new ocular—the one she replaced back in Surabaya. Half of her vision sears off in a dazzling wildfire of snowy code and then goes gray, then beet red, then black.

  Crashed.

  Wire rubs her head and gets a hold of herself. Wigging out like a maniac is not going to help her situation. In fact, if the sub was ravaged by scavengers they could still be close by. She might have already given her position away, and like an idiot she’s out in the open like a sitting duck. As she pounds the heel of her hand into the side of her head several times in the lame hope to jar a reboot, blood leaks from her inflamed eye like tears.

  Those scum-sucking cretins; if Wire ruled the world every last black marketer back in Surabaya and intern at the pop-and-op clinic would die a thousand slow deaths.

  ON HIGHER GROUND

  Not far away from the cliff and several hours later that same afternoon, the children’s gathered information on the compound has Trick’s mental bandwidth charged up.

  “I know it sounds ballsy as all get out, but we’d be crazy not to give it a try. No weapons and a lousy lock on a gate? I’m tellin’ you, this situation be riper than ripe.”

  The group is a gallery of slackened faces. Besides the occasional cricking snap of campfire embers, the only other noise in the camp’s clearing is a large cast iron pot simmering with some of the recently procured dried beans. Trick crouches by the pot and jabs a stick into the fire.

  “The key be we got to go tonight under cover of darkness. Move in and blitz ’em. Probably think we ain’t got the chops because we sent the runts out to beg, and that rolls in our favor, right-right.”

  Someone mutters something about Sin Frontera, and Trick chucks his stick at them.

  “Sin Frontera!? Ain’t you been listenin’? Damn it, think for once, all of you. This be about our survival, not theirs. Just ask yourselves, did them people offer to take them runts in? No! And look at what they spared! Apples, a couple dozen hardboiled eggs, stale brown bread, and dried beans that look like they be takin’ a year and a day to cook? Not even fresh water! Downright insultin’. Bet they be hopin’ we don’t push our luck and move along. They got more in there and I say we take it.”

  Trick’s zeal leaves little room for discussion. Still, desultory reservations get mouthed. Maybe it would be safer to move on to Sin Frontera or even to the mountains. Either way, their group could stumble upon something else without taking such a chance. But Shirley’s slit throat is still fresh in everyone’s minds. Any reservations peter out.

  “We’ll take six,” Trick says. “Me and Grum, Jasper, Foo, Mooch, and Ashida because we got the most scrap. Things wheedle hairy inside, we got to intimidate. Go brutal.”

  Grum raises a hand. “But you just said them be weak, Trick.”

  Trick wheels. “Shut up! Even the weak can go gonzo on you if you push ’em. No-no, it’s settled. In a few hours it’ll be dark and them’ll be sacked out. We’ll catch ’em off guard. All of you I just named, grab the sturdiest thing you can find.”

  SISTER MORPHEUS

  Later that same evening and back in her room in Lodge Delta, Koko sits cross-legged on the bed and fumes.

  Yeah, okay, maybe stealing a bunch of drugs wasn’t the smartest thing to do seeing she’s still on unfriendly ground, but for all this fishy bragging on about building a community or social petri dish or whatever, why didn’t Sébastien or the doc bring up the fact that every place needs a damn watering hole? A little dive with some bung-nozzles of rotgut teat-hanging from the ceiling, maybe a couple of brew taps in the commissary, was that so much to ask? Pulling a vial from her pocket, Koko untwists the cap and shakes a few opioid gels into her hand. Of course she probably shouldn’t, but given the facts that she has a knife now, that the transport is finally on its way, that Sébastien has been sufficiently warned, and that she’s braced one of the room’s high-backed chairs to block the door, Koko thinks a little stress relief is more than deserved. Swallowing two gels with a third bitten in half as a chaser, she doesn’t even change out of her clothes, lies back, and soon, like a rising lake of the blackest mud, sleep overtakes her.

  It seems like only a minute has passed, but hours later, an impossibly loud scream rips her awake. Heart slamming, she wonders if it was her own scream, forced by a nightmare, but when a second scream pierces the air, instinctually Koko instantly rolls from the bed and sweeps her hand beneath it for a stowed weapon. Cursing and groggy, she then remembers where she is and reels toward the window. It’s still dark out, but beneath the eerie glow of the solar-powered courtyard lights she sees an all-out argy-bargy along the westward wa
ll.

  De-civs.

  Still dressed and in her socks, Koko spins around and tears out of the room. Ping-ponging down the hallway, she reaches the stairwell, gropes her way down the stairs, and crashes through the doors at the bottom. Looking right, the outlines of the attackers crystallize in her still-addled sights. Commonagers roused by the intrusion and the screaming, like her, do nothing to stop the invading de-civs, and most are being beaten savagely at every turn.

  Koko rushes forward. Seizing the first de-civ she can by the shoulder, she jerks the man around and chops a hand across his windpipe. Gasping, the de-civ drops to his knees, Koko then pile-drives a second palm strike to the back of his neck to finish him off. Refocusing, she remembers the stolen paring knife in her pocket and draws it. The remaining de-civs whip their heads and Koko counts five. Fuck. Being outnumbered is never good, and with the opioids she’s ingested, Koko is still half in the bag.

  One of the Commonagers wobbles over to her, his face streaked with blood. Koko drags the man behind her back as the first two of the remaining five de-civs come at them both holding thick sticks out like jousting lances. When they’re close enough, Koko leaps up, whirls her legs, and kicks both sticks from their hands.

  The ground comes up fast, but Koko rolls and lands on her feet. One of the two disarmed jousters then makes a go for her shoulder, so Koko promptly knees him in the crotch and drives the paring knife into his ear. Blood jetting out over her hand, Koko is unable to free the blade and senses the second jouster coming at her. Bending, she uses the man’s forward momentum and hurls the de-civ over her shoulder. When he lands on his back, Koko quickly drops on top of him, grabs his head and twists—CRRRITCH!

  Three down, three to go…

  Getting up, Koko roars, and the remaining three turn and hightail it for the access tunnel. Glancing over his shoulder, one of the de-civs—a wiry, dark-skinned man, stops and momentarily locks eyes with her as Gammy darts across the grounds at an insane rate of speed.