by Kieran Shea
“No! I mean, that’s why we tried to get in there in the first place. Trick and me, we gooned them a while ago, right-right? And we’d some of the younger ones ask for food. When them gave the children some, well, Trick thought they be weak.”
“So you mounted a raid.”
“Six of us, right-right.”
“What’s inside?”
“Stuff, people. I don’t know, it be so crazy. There’s, like, structures and animals. Trick here thought it be bestest to go in at night and try to rob them when them sleepin’. It got out of hand.”
“Out of hand how?”
“This wild woman and big blue dog came out of nowhere. We didn’t know they’d no dog, and that wild woman? A hot meany she be.”
Wire’s lips twitch. “Describe her.”
“Kind of small,” Grum replies.
Wire points a finger at Trick. “You mean small like this piece of shit?”
“Kind of, but I didn’t get a good look at her face.”
Trick grumbles, “That’s because you were too busy saving your own butt.”
Wire pulls her Sig from her holster and hauls back to crack Trick’s skull again, and Grum cries out.
“Dark hair!”
Wire whipsaws around. “What?”
“The woman,” Grum says, “she got dark hair. And short. Not as short as yours, but she be meaner than meany, truer-than-true. Took out three of us all by herself.”
“Three?” Wire says. “Counting you two that makes five. You said six before. Are you lying to me again?”
“No! The dog got the other one. Ate him all up.”
“Ate?”
“Yeah, but that woman? She be a full-on wolf herself.”
Wire’s good eye narrows.
Martstellar.
THE DEFENSES BEGIN
Several hours later and little after eight A.M., Sébastien, Dr. Corella, Gammy, and Koko climb a set of stairs to a parapet on the western wall of the Commonage.
The late-night raid has everyone in the compound on pins, and word of the mandatory assembly spreads quickly. Restless and worried, the entire Commonage’s population coalesces in the central courtyard. Up on the wall, Koko stands loose with her hands on hips and combs her eyes through the faces below. All seem present except, for some odd reason Flynn is nowhere to be seen.
Sébastien positions himself slightly behind Koko on her right, and Dr. Corella holds up his hands to quell the murmuring crowd.
“People, may I have your attention, please…”
Everyone quiets down.
“Thank you. We appreciate your taking time out of your daily obligations this morning to attend this emergency assembly regarding the events that transpired a few short hours ago,” Dr. Corella says. “We know you’re concerned, but we’re here to advise you that there is an immediate action plan to address the issue.”
Stepping back, the doctor looks at Koko before he joins Sébastien and Gammy sitting at his side. None of them have slept and Koko’s nerves are ragged, so she runs a hand through her hair a couple of times before she steps forward. Blearily, she tries to recall the best way to address large groups and then remembers something about avoiding direct eye contact. Like most, Koko doesn’t relish the prospect of public speaking as her only experience was when she pulled demonstration control at a port uprising in Maputo nine years before. A hostage standoff and nerve gas canisters had to be deployed, so no… her public speaking that time did not go well at all.
The pearly sun has risen higher over the eastern mountains, so shading her eyes Koko begins.
“Okay, let’s not waste any more time. As most of you already know, my name is Koko. Because of that storm the other night my friend and I ended up here and while this was by no means our intention, right now you and I are in the same boat. What you might not know about me is that up until a short time ago I was a full-time soldier. Now, I know what you’re thinking—her? Yeah, it’s true. I’m not denying it, but since then I’ve left that part of my life behind.”
Koko deliberately steals a glance back at Sébastien and then resumes addressing the crowd.
“From a resistance standpoint what I witnessed last night was pathetic. Those de-civs who attacked? Don’t kid yourselves. It’s likely they’ll try to give the compound a second go, so with Dr. Corella’s and Sébastien’s consent, I’m going to show you how to secure this place. A full briefing with secondary labor assignments will begin in this courtyard in ten minutes.” Koko adds a clarion note to close. “Thank you for your attention.”
Sébastien steps forward and waves a hand at the gathered crowd as a signal that the address is now over. The people disperse into smaller groups, and with her tail wagging Gammy rushes over to Koko’s side. Turning briefly to look out at the woods, Koko speaks quickly.
“I’m going to need help with subdividing Commonagers into construction teams for the cheval-de-frise barriers. It’s better if there’re two groups: manufacturing and placement.”
“Pelham is good with organizing,” Dr. Corella suggests.
“Good.”
“Just how long should this take?” Sébastien then asks.
With her knee Koko bumps Gammy’s hip. “Well, with Flynn getting fixed up I’ve already clocked most of your glaring vulnerabilities. After I give Pelham some instructions, and if things go well, we can work on more robust measures after that. Once the AA transport arrives though, you idiots are on your own.”
Sébastien and Dr. Corella exchange pensive looks.
“What?” Koko asks.
“Nothing,” Sébastien says.
Koko roasts the harshest of gazes at the both of them. “Look, right now I’m only looking out for my own best interests. You two might think you know all about me and Flynn, but I warned you earlier, Sébastien. Here on in, if you or the doc here even think about messing with me or that incoming transport, top down I’m clearing house.”
Dr. Corella steps forward. “Koko, I’m afraid, well—I think Sébastien and I are both a bit frazzled. The events of the past few days, it’s all been so taxing. But no… this is the right thing to do. We should get on these protections right away for all involved. We will oblige and accommodate your needs here on in.”
All three of them move for the stairs and Gammy gambols ahead. Dr. Corella pauses before descending.
“Sébastien?”
“Yes? What is it?”
“I’d like to give you an in-depth prognosis report on the wounded, if I might.”
“Now?”
Dr. Corella gestures with his head—yes. “I think we should. Oh, look. There’s Pelham.” He calls out, “Pelham? Could you come over here for a moment, please?”
The tall woman crosses over to the bottom of the stairs. Koko meets her and the two of them look up at Sébastien and Dr. Corella. Pelham shields her eyes.
“Yes?”
“Koko would like some assistance with organizing the labor groups, do you mind giving her a hand?”
Pelham looks at Koko. “Absolutely.”
Across the courtyard, Gammy roots in some bushes and then barks. When Koko turns and looks back up the stairs, Dr. Corella waves at her.
“We’ll be with you in a minute,” he says.
* * *
Whispers.
“Sébastien, it’s Flynn… the TAM cognitive reactions—they’re extraordinary. His are some of the most remarkable I’ve ever seen.”
Guardedly, Sébastien quickly steals a look at Koko and Pelham conferring at the bottom of the stairs. “But the incoming transport—”
“Remember your suggestion? Back in the alcove after their arrival?”
Sébastien’s eyes widen. “You mean with Koko? But I thought—”
“No,” Dr. Corella adds. “I was wrong. We’d be fools.”
“When?”
“I was thinking tomorrow at breakfast. We should let her finish the fortifications.”
Sébastien guides the doctor down the stairs.
BEANS AND SC
HEMES
On her haunches in the camp just after sunrise, Wire shovels in spoon after spoon of beans from a tin cup. The beans are protein, but the taste is ghastly. Like half-hardened potato bugs simmered in swamp ass. Admittedly, Wire’s had worse.
“I’ll be straight with you,” she says between bites. “I’ve no interest in who you are or where the hell you think you’re going, because frankly? Your kind is nothing but a waste of oxygen to me. I mean, Sin Frontera? Good luck with that shit, suckers. Last I heard that place was nothing but a make-believe Neverland to winnow out the dumb. Seeing that you took on a walled compound without weapons, I guess I should expect as much.”
Trick mumbles. “Hungry…”
“What?”
“I said, we be hungry.”
“If you’re reduced to eating this slop, I should say so.” Wire drops the spoon into the tin cup and lobs the cup over her shoulder.
“So if you ain’t got no interest in us, you goin’ to let us go?”
“I haven’t decided yet.”
“Why not?”
“Two words, Trick. De and civ.”
“Ain’t that hyphenated?”
Wire pats the Sig on her hip. “And just as easily ventilated.”
“Maybe you-me-you could help each other out.”
Wire gets up and crosses to where Trick kneels. The fuzzy wash of light feeding in from her damaged ocular is still giving Wire a humdinger of a headache.
“Oh, yeah? Help me out how?”
“Well,” Trick says, “that wild woman be the one you’re after, right-right? You got your needs, and we got ours. Workin’ together might be bestest.”
Wire laughs and presses a boot into Trick’s shoulder. Pushing him over in the dirt, she grinds the tip of her toe on his gashed temple like she’s squashing an insect.
“Work together, huh? How?”
Trick moves his head away from her milling boot. “All I be sayin’ is we got numbers. Plenty of us have seen our fair share of scrapes, and numbers can always give you an edge.”
Wire scorns, “Numbers—don’t make me puke. Alone I’ve waded in more blood and fought in more places than you can possibly imagine. If anything, you mangy degenerates are nothing but a bunch of liabilities to me.”
“That may be,” Trick counters, “but we still be hungry and willin’ to fight.”
Wire looks at the others in the camp. “Is that true? You all are that desperate you want to jeopardize your lives?”
At first not a soul presumes to look up from their sagging positions, but after half a minute the nods hesitantly begin. Soon one de-civ mirrors another and the answer looks unanimous, even with the children.
Wire sighs. Rank disgusting facial sores, and grotty to the letter, maybe it isn’t such a bad idea. Maybe she could use them. Set up a diversion. Rouse up some distractive havoc. Hmm, she needs to check out the compound first. She orders Grum and Trick and one of the children, a boy, to get up. When the boy starts to blubber and cry for his mother, Wire jerks him aside and tells him to quit his fussing or she’ll castrate him with Trick’s knife.
“Look at me, kid,” she says. “I might need an extra set of hands so you’re going to do what I say when I say it, understand?”
After the boy nods feebly, Wire cuts off the line binding his hands.
Now on their feet, Trick and Grum turn around and offer out their hands for Wire to cut their bindings as well, but Wire ignores them. She folds and slips the jackknife into her breast pocket and then pulls her Sig.
“I’m taking you two and this boy to scope out the compound. If what I see jibes with your story maybe, just maybe, I’ll consider Trick’s proposal.”
Trick pumps his legs. “Now you’re talkin’. Hey, you got a name?”
“Wire.”
“Wire?”
“Yeah, Wire. Now seeing that the rest of you mongrels are unreliable shit-stains, I fully expect one of you to try and save your own diseased skin once we head off. That’s fine, and I guess it’s your right. But if you do decide to run off, know this: I’ve no qualms about making this little boy’s last moments alive ones of unbelievable misery and pain.”
Using her Sig, Wire gives Trick and Grum hard shoves from behind.
“Let’s move out.”
* * *
It takes them a half hour to cut through the woods with Grum and the boy leading the way up front. Hanging in the rear, Wire prods Trick forward as he whispers.
“The bestest spot to keep low be just ahead, ’bout a hundred paces where the trees peter out. That be where we gooned the compound before.”
Even with her hampered vision, through the trees and in the distance Wire can make out the hulking white outline of the structure. Circular, the compound sits on a small rise beyond a large bramble-infested field and, as they draw closer, Wire blows a short whistle and gestures to Grum and the boy to hold up and stay low.
Kicking out both of his knees, Wire forces Trick down on the ground and studies the compound.
Trick looks up.
“What you goon?”
Wire thwacks the butt of her Sig on the top of his head.
“Shut up.”
Without her ocular working, she takes things in slowly. Wire spots the tunnel entrance the de-civs used for their infiltration hours earlier, and the broken tunnel gate looks like it has been addressed with a quick wrap of thick rope. Raising her sights, she then scans the upper edges of the walls. The structure appears to have no recessed weaponry, electrified concertina wire, or obvious defensive measures of any kind. Outward appearances can be misleading, but damn if Trick and Grum weren’t telling her the truth. Even if she doesn’t end up infiltrating the compound through the weakly fortified gate, the walls are a farce. She takes a guess at a vertical reading: four meters. Using a swift sprint, Wire could clear the wall easily with a parkour saut de précision and follow-up passement.
Detecting movement, she then notices three bodies sorting themselves out along the wall’s upper edges. The three are visible only from the waist up, and two appear to be male and the third looks female. It’s hard to see much else because all three have their backs turned, and one of the men seems to be addressing someone farther inside the compound. When the female steps forward, Wire waits and then when the woman turns she chuckles softly to herself.
Bingo.
If only she hadn’t lost the rest of her gear when the Goliath crashed. One well-placed shot with a rocket-propelled grenade and Wire could easily take out Martstellar like a thunderbolt from the blue. Getting inside the compound will take some minor planning, but nevertheless Wire’s mood has brightened considerably.
Grabbing Trick by the scruff of his neck, she hauls him to his feet.
“Guess what? Today is your lucky day, maggot.”
ON THEIR BACKS
Later that evening, after a long day of fixing the Commonage’s blatant susceptibilities, fortifying the tunnel gate with additional chains, and helping the Commonagers build impromptu barriers and placing them along the outer walls of the compound, Koko returns to her room in Lodge Delta and is surprised to see Flynn sitting in one of the straight-back chairs beneath the window. Shutting the door, she quietly leans a newly fashioned wooden battle staff in a corner. Once the barrier assembly was under way, Pelham had showed Koko a pile of good unused lumber and Koko took a piece of the unutilized wood to hone down a battle staff. Intrigued by what she was doing, Pelham asked how she could make a battle staff for herself. Koko showed her how easy it was and suggested that later when all the fortifications were in place the rest of the Commonagers should make battle staffs for themselves too.
Flynn looks up. “Oh, hey there…”
Koko crosses to him. She pauses for a moment before she lowers her face and gives him a quick kiss on the cheek.
“Hey there yourself.”
Achy and sweaty, Koko decides for now it might be better to just forgive and forget their blow-up back in the infirmary. Running a palm
over a bothersome cowlick in Flynn’s hair, she looks down at the object in his hands.
“Is that a book? Huh. You don’t see a lot of those things around anymore. I hope you’re reading something good.”
Flynn turns the book over so she can see the embossed title:
The Arabian Nights: Tales from a Thousand and One Nights.
“It’s kind of dense,” Flynn explains. “And it’s been slow going with only one eye, but it’s not half bad. It’s all about this guy with a mess of problems. Lots of betrayal, virgin executions, tragedy, the whole deal. I think you’d like it.”
Koko strokes his hair some more. “I’m not much of a reader,” she says. “Where did you get it?”
“Some Commonagers brought it here an hour or two ago when they came by to change the linens. I guess they thought I might like something to pass the time. Check out the cloth binding. Must be a couple of hundred years old at least. They said it came from Sébastien’s private collection.”
Koko then remembers her earlier infiltration into Sébastien’s quarters, and thinks about the memory dot she retrieved from the crushed needle drive that she almost forgot is still in her pant pocket. She has a hunch that the memory dot might contain damaging information on the Commonage and exactly what Sébastien and Dr. Corella are up to, but seeing that she doesn’t have access to tech at present and the transport is on the way within hours, she makes a mental note to look at it once they’re good and gone. Flynn points to a teapot on the desk.
“Want some tea? It’s jasmine, and it’s really, really good. Nice to sip after a rough day.”
“No thanks. So, how’s the leg?” Koko asks.
Flynn beams. “It’s good. Actually, Dr. Corella went so far as to show me all these trippy MRIs of my muscle tissue. I’ve got to stretch at least three times a day for the foreseeable future, but in no time I should have ninety-five percent mobility.”
“Wow.”
Koko deliberates whether she should bring up their leaving the Commonage again. Considering the fever of their spat in the infirmary and her epic loss of control shortly thereafter, she then reasons it might be best to skirt the subject for now. Flynn… he looks so mellow. Koko then wonders if there’s something medicinal added to his tea. Man, when they finally get to wherever they’re going she’s definitely going to make it a priority to pour herself a tall belt of something strong.
