Sébastien rubs his chin. “God, I need to see what I can find out about them first.”
“Of course, that’s only prudent. But starting Flynn on TAM should balance things out. One less person to worry about acting out anyway. We can’t use TAM on Koko regrettably.”
“Why not?”
“Sébastien, TAM subjects need to be fully conscious to administer the first and second doses. Even if we could further sedate Koko and use response limiters, she’s a former soldier who would do her utmost to resist. In its current form the TAM procedure is extremely delicate. If Koko moves even a bit—good God, I don’t want to lobotomize the woman. But Flynn, well, he’s already being cared for. I could say the first injection is part of his treatment. We could take things from there.”
Sébastien pictures it.
“So, we’re in agreement?” Dr. Corella asks.
Sébastien steps closer and places a commiserating hand on the doctor’s shoulder.
“Okay, we’ll play it your way. We’ll keep up the face with Koko to put her at ease and get Flynn started on TAM. How long will the inhibitor and sedative last?”
“Given her already depleted state? I estimate four to five hours,” Dr. Corella says.
Convalescing in her climate-controlled suite at The Grand Monggo-Monggo Hotel, Wire stands at her window, comfortably draped in a white complimentary robe. After shaking out a trio of antibiotic pills from a vial, she slips the pills under her tongue and chases them with a flood of potent, hot 126-proof arak.
While smogged, the view of Surabaya between the room’s drawn blackout curtains is impressive: a blazing seventy-story high panoramic of unrepentant squalor and industrialized blight.
On the other hand, in the sepulcher-like air of her luxury suite, Wire herself feels outstanding. Rested, fine-tuned, and pretty much amazing. After she’d had her ocular implant and teeth repaired, the interns at the pop-and-op clinic advised her that beyond precautionary treatments, with rest and plenty of fluids she was good to go. No signs of a parasitic disease manifesting in larva-laying microscopics, no exotic sub-viral infections or internal distress. Diligent, the pop-and-op interns provided Wire with a full regime of antibiotics and cautioned her to refrain from imbibing any alcohol. Yeah, right… like
that
was going to happen. Medically minded twits—they may have their remedies, but Wire has her own.
As she polishes off the rest of her drink, from the king-sized bed behind her drifts a somnolent groan. Turning, Wire smirks as a young man and woman cower in a knot of blood-spattered sheets.
Color her seedy, but Wire believes a little exhilarative extravagance now and then goes a long way in the healing of whatever ails you. The fact is, she’s never been one to eschew her own personal satisfactions, and at her request The Grand Monggo-Monggo’s concierge sent up two prostitutes to her suite the previous evening. The tantalizing talent arrived just after her dinner had been whisked in by room service, and the meal itself was superb—a platter of braised mimicry proteins and hydroponically grown fruits. Even now the extraordinary tastes of the dinner linger in Wire’s memory. Freshly broiled Sphynx cat with guava chutney, poached reptile medallions spiced with garlic, and a dome of sticky rice dusted with powdered cricket bacon. After finishing her meal, she gave the prostitutes explicit instructions to commence a full circus of carnal acrobatics while she drained off a magnum of solar ale. Later Wire brushed her teeth, stripped, and joined the two on the bed until they were all wrung out, beaten, and spent.
The male prostitute holds his female counterpart around her shoulders. Both have bloodstone-bruised jaws, and one of the female’s eyes is completely puffed shut like a rotten fig. Fear bleeds the remaining color from their faces, and they scrabble out of the bed like a pair of frightened rabbits. Heartlessly aloof, Wire follows them as they pick up their flimsy clothes. She points to a credenza by the suite’s door.
“There’s extra credits for both of you in the envelope. It should cover whatever medical treatment is necessary. Please tell the concierge my compliments. Your stamina surpassed my expectations.”
As if he’s seizing a written stay of execution, the male snatches up the envelope, and the female flings open the suite’s door. Seconds later, both of the prostitutes take off down the hall, running.
Wire chuckles and closes the suite’s door. Cracking her neck, she unfastens her robe and lets the thick cover-up slip to the floor.
Wearing black compression shorts and matching sports bra, Wire begins her daily workout regime: a quick, brutal set of calisthenics that includes lunges, deep crunches, and two hundred straight pushups as well as twenty-five additional pushups, one-handed. Her goal is to max out her heart rate at one hundred and seventy-two beats per minute, and a short time later Wire feels fully limber and ready to rock her day. Admiring her sweaty, jacked build in a wide mirror affixed to the suite’s far wall, she gives her nipples a brief, playful tweak.
Damn, girl, looking gooooooood
.
After peeling out of her sweat-moistened garments, she then takes a ridiculously long steam shower, replaying her activities thus far.
Once she booked her room at The Grand Monggo-Monggo, Wire used the hotel’s secure data-uplink amenities to kick her personal reboot into a higher gear. Her first matter of business was accessing her credit balances and investments holdings to see what she could quickly offload to get her back in the game at full strength. Of course, she immediately checked the status on the gnaw-ware program embedded in her shadow flowcode address. With the poison Britch injected her with, she may have been at death’s door, but she wasn’t stupid. She gave him a shadow flowcode address used for covert black-ops. Once entered, it launches an undetectable gnaw-ware program. When Britch eventually accesses his off-world accounts, the gnaw-ware will activate and present a ‘dummy’ account with a few thousand credits as a diversionary ploy. Meanwhile the rest of Britch’s off-world savings and associated investments would be transferred into Wire’s own accounts. As a bonus, the savage piece of programming would subsequently reach out, infect, and plunder any and all mainframes connected to the data tab before it vanishes completely. Sadly, when Wire discovered the gnaw-ware hadn’t launched yet it made her wonder. Could Britch have figured out the devastating back-end embedded in her uploaded address? No, that would be impossible. Once more, she felt stung at being compromised, but then when she noticed a message in her inbox from Britch with attachments she actually laughed out loud. What do you know? The fat tub of pus held up his end of the bargain!
Lord, Britch, what kind of dipshit honors a deal?
A dipshit sucker, that’s who.
The data from Britch indicated that Martstellar intended to make a serious break for the flooded coastal fjord metropolises east of the Hecate Strait. Located just west of the Kitimat Ranges of former British Columbia, and well north of the deplorable New Vancouver supercities, the region was a twisted maze of strip mines, platform derricks, and mineral refineries primarily owned and operated by the new Canadian government’s resource alliance—C-GRAP. Not exactly a hospitable destination given the unruly arbitrage fluctuations and governmental infighting, but when Wire thinks about it she suspects C-GRAP’s bustling maritime ghettos are at least a decent place to go to ground. The real dripping cherry on the cake from Britch was that Martstellar downloaded a list of shipbrokers and recycle specialists in the region. Damn. Britch’s speculations were on target: Martstellar and her cohort aimed to offload the stolen sub to keep their pockets flush.
With her mood significantly improved, Wire then forwarded a series of encrypted flowcode communications across her network to see if any of her contacts knew who was running the show off the books in Surabaya. This took a little more time, but within a few hours she had a bead on the whole degenerate briar patch. An associate of hers was well-connected throughout Indonesia, and he owed Wire plenty. The associate delivered new clothes via courier and put Wire in touch with a black market outfit that had a long-range personal propulsion aircraft for sale.
Used in Chile’s Atacama Desert during the recent restructuring engagements, the bird for sale had some wear and tear indicated in its schematics, but was fully equipped with serious weapon capabilities. It did strike Wire as a bit strange that such an aircraft had ended up in Surabaya, but then some 3-D-rendered cross-referencing on conflict trade activities revealed the aircraft had been part of a larger geo-political transaction. Wire placed a deposit and made plans to check out the aircraft later that afternoon. If everything appeared to be on the up and up, she’d fly the hell out of Surabaya as soon as possible.
While she towels off, the suite’s augmented intelligence screens engage and advise Wire that she has a visitor waiting for her downstairs in the hotel’s lobby. After quickly selecting one of her new tailored tactical suits (the one with climate insulation settings and environmental recognition software), Wire dresses and pulls on her new field boots. She stuffs her pant cuffs into the boots’ tops and pockets a new handheld uplink. Not one to take chances, she takes a steak knife from her room service tray and tucks the long serrated blade down her right boot.
After a plunging glide in a glass-walled lift, Wire arrives in the gleaming, marbled lobby. The Grand Monggo-Monggo’s lobby is heavily palmed and decorated to a T, and as she looks around she identifies her visitor. Much older than expected, the visitor is a man of medium build who carries himself with a small, hidden defect in his step, as if he is attempting to hold in a fart. As he draws closer, the man’s disturbing personal disfigurement becomes apparent. Wire assumes radiation scarring, but there’s so much ulcerated scar damage on his face that his features resemble the bumpy, jaundiced texture of a dried apricot. He holds two gunmetal attaché cases and wears a plain collarless black linen suit over a white silk shirt. An old school, inert-connected translator is secured to the man’s mouth and left ear with lamprey-like barbs.
“
Hpphshh
—Jackie Wire?”
Wire almost puts out her hand in greeting, but she notices the man is not making a move to offer one of his own.
“That’s me,” Wire replies. “The one and only. So, you got my shit?”
The scarred man lifts up the two cases, and Wire is immediately suspicious. If all the weapons she requested were present, the two cases would be heavier than her body weight on Jupiter. There might be nothing inside them at all, and this could be a shakedown. Then again, the man’s ease at lifting them could mean his clothes are concealing powerful hydraulic prosthetics. Both cases are armed with tiny winking clip-on detonators.
“
Hpphshh—
follow me, please.”
Wire holds up a hand. “Hold on a second there, sport. I thought we were going to go someplace for the transaction.”
A long sputter riffs through the translator speaker as the man stares at her and then brusquely turns. Wary and checking her surroundings, Wire follows him and a minute later they enter a windowless conference room down an adjacent hallway behind the hotel’s reception kiosks. The conference room is bare except for a long glass table with eight high-backed chairs lined up on one side. The man gently sets both of the cases down on the glass table, while Wire’s eyes scour the room’s corners for hidden visual receptors, listening devices, and possible weapons. The man’s translator whirs.
“This room is safe. Please transfer the credits as discussed.”
Man
, Wire thinks,
all this overt pushiness is feeling a bit shady
. She wonders how quickly she could grab the steak knife tucked in her boot.
“Mind if I inspect what I’m buying first?” she asks.
The scar-faced man shakes his head. “When your credits are transferred and the receipt is substantiated, only then am I authorized to disengage the security measures on the cases. This was outlined in our flowcode message—
hpphshh.
”
“Yeah, I know, but normally…”
“Please initiate transfer or this transaction will be terminated.”
Fucker.
Wire tries to read the man’s flat eyes.
“You ripping me off? Feels like I’m sticking my neck out.”
“
Hpphshh
—nature of risk. Need I remind you, you are the one who reached out to us, not the other way around.”
Okay
, Wire thinks,
so prune-face here is all business and a major-league dick.
Chest puffing and skepticism is getting her nowhere, so she unzips a pocket on her new tactical suit and retrieves her new handheld. Pulling up the interface, she lifts her eyes and asks the man for the transaction code—a twenty-seven sequence of characters interspersed with universal credit modifiers and numbers. She reads back the numbers, characters, and modifiers in order and when the man’s head nods she engages the transfer icon.
The man touches the left side of his head as he receives verification via the translator’s connecting earpiece. Without a word he then bends forward, disengages the clip-on detonators on the two cases, slips the detonators into his suit jacket, and leaves.
Wire opens the cases. Packed in several layers of gray ballistic memory foam are enough weapons to wage a small war. Pulse pistols, integrated ammunition sleeves and stocks, electronics, grenades, and combat field supplies, all polished and pristine. She may have gone overboard a little to round her barbarous accouterment, but Wire is the type to go big when she goes hard.
She shuts both cases, removes the steak knife from her boot, and tosses it on the glass table.
Carrying the heavy cases out into the lobby, Wire takes the lift back up to her room.
It’s time to pack the rest of her things and get the fuck out of Dodge.
“Words cannot adequately express my sympathies,” Sébastien says.