Wire spits out the hot digit swimming in her mouth as Trick yells at Grum.
“GRUM, GET UP! HELP ME HERE GODDAMNIT!”
Popping up to a ready stance, Wire flashes her good eye around. Her thrown-away Sig is nowhere to be seen, but what she does see is Grum’s dropped stick of rebar lying in the grass just off to her right. As Trick staggers backward and steps on Wire’s discarded weapon, Wire lunges for the rebar just as Trick turns and grabs the Sig. With his ruined hand, the weapon’s recoil herky-jerks his aim wildly and blue pulse rounds zing off in all directions. Gripping the rebar, Wire swings for the stars and connects. The single blow shatters Trick’s elbow like a clamshell.
Shrieking louder this time, Trick instantly drops Wire’s pistol and stumbles backward. Spinning right, Wire lunges and thrusts the rebar straight through Trick’s gut.
A hiccupped transcendence siphons off the last of Trick’s confidence. Wire waits and then yanks back on the rebar, pulling out a spurting gurgle of torn intestines. When Trick drops to his knees he attempts to stuff his guts back in the gushing hole in his stomach and realizes it’s no use. Wire stands and cracks her neck.
“I swear, trusting de-civ trash like you… I mean, really? Attacking
me
? What, you’ve got nothing better to do?”
Trick looks up at her. Wire lines up the rebar on his shoulder, draws back, and cuts his head off with one magnificent, whizzing stroke.
* * *
Serpentining across the ground, out of the corner of her eye Koko sees that Flynn has successfully reached the garden wall by Lodge Delta. Astounded that neither of them have been cut to pieces by pulse fire yet, Koko glances backward and discovers the reason why. No longer atop the wall, the bounty agent is busy rolling around on the ground with the rangy-looking de-civ Koko remembers chasing into the access tunnel the night before.
Not knowing who’ll win the battle, Koko hurdles the wall and lands next to Flynn just as several pulse rounds zip past overhead. Reading each other’s thoughts, they both get up and rush for the Lodge Delta doors.
Seconds later Koko and Flynn are inside. Flynn yells at her to stay down, but she ignores him and edges up to the doors’ windows. The unrelenting bloodbath outside continues to unwind in slow motion.
Koko sees two skinny women crosscheck Sébastien to the bricks. Gammy attacks the women viciously. Looking to the bounty agent, Koko sees the woman decapitate her opponent with a long rod. When the bounty agent picks up a weapon in the grass close by and checks it, the sepia glow of the spreading fires makes the woman look almost hellishly ascendant. But Koko detects something wrong. There’s something off-kilter about the bounty agent’s sway and gait.
When the woman homes in on Lodge Delta, Koko ducks down and instantly fears she’s been made. Sitting on her heels and mamboing two quick fingers at Flynn to head up the stairs, Koko fully anticipates an explosion of pulse fire to rip apart the doors.
Flynn refuses to budge.
“God, don’t be stupid, Flynn! Just go!”
“I’m not leaving you!”
When the door doesn’t rip apart or blast inward, Koko hazards another glimpse out the windows. The bounty agent has now turned her attentions away from Lodge Delta to the rest of the chaos shredding the Commonage. Weapon up, straight-armed, and shooting indiscriminately, the woman’s first eight pulse rounds miss her intended targets, but then a wild follow-up shot tags Pelham, who flies backward as if she’s been hit by a wrecking ball. The bounty agent keeps firing and the sickening chorus of screams rises. Flynn scuttles over to her and tries to drag Koko down by her waist, but Koko tears off his hands.
Across the courtyard, Gammy whips up her head from Sébastien’s cringing attackers. Stiff-spined and gumline bared, Gammy then rushes the bounty agent. A pulse round throws the synthetic sideways in a yelping whorl of white-hot sparks.
Koko can’t bring herself to look away. When the bounty agent finally reaches Sébastien, she grabs him with one hand and lifts him up like a puppet. Koko can’t make out Sébastien’s frantic words, but to her it sounds like
cheese
, and
sky can gib-boo-bunny.
Sébastien is pleading for his life.
Please! I can give you money!
Leaning in, the bounty agent bites out his eye anyway.
“Damn it all to hell,” Koko says.
Stepping past Flynn, Koko kicks Lodge Delta’s doors open and blows out a sharp, looping whistle. Dropping Sébastien in a squealing heap, the bounty agent turns.
“Martstellar!”
Koko hurdles the small wall and moves across the open ground.
“Yeah, we haven’t been formerly introduced, fucker.”
Not taking her eyes off Koko, Wire casually blasts a round into Sébastien
’s
ruined face.
“The name’s Wire.”
“Wire?”
“Yeah, Jackie Wire. Do you have any idea how much trouble you’ve caused me, you little imp?”
“I’m guessing a lot.”
“Veritable pantloads.”
Flynn stumbles out of Lodge Delta. When he sees Koko closing in on the bounty agent he shouts.
“Koko, stop! She’ll kill you!”
Koko hears Flynn, but it’s too late. She’s committed now, and there’s no way she’s going to back down, not from some butch-looking psychopath pursuing her halfway across the world like this.
“I sort of hoped you ate it big time back on
Alaungpaya
,” Koko says, “but then you showed up on The Sixty and now you’re here. I guess you’re some kind of super cockroach that just won’t quit, huh?”
Wire gestures to Flynn. “I see you brought your boyfriend.”
“Leave him out of this.”
When Koko is ten meters from her, Wire lifts her weapon and Koko slams on the brakes. Taking a slow, Shaolin breath and lifting her arms above her head, Koko says, “I don’t know what you’re doing with these de-civs, but if you’re here for me then let’s do it. Leave the rest of these people be.”
Wire fires a single pulse at the bricks, and red specks of rock sprinkle Koko’s legs. The spray makes Koko backpedal a bit, but once again she notes a differential in the bounty agent’s gloating, blood-splattered face.
There must be something wrong with her ocular
, Koko surmises.
A malfunctioning ocular implant could explain the woman’s piss-poor shooting, and the deficiency is definitely an advantage for Koko if she can stall long enough to get a chance. Wire then motions to the compound walls.
“What the hell is this place anyway?”
Giving their surroundings a brief commiserative look, Koko sighs.
“It’s a settlement.”
“Yeah, I can see that, but here? In the Nor’Am prohibs? The fuck’s up with that?”
Koko bends a finger at Sébastien. “That guy you just smoked put it all together. He made a killing in pharmaceuticals and blew it all setting this place up. It’s called the Commonage.”
Wire scowls. “If this place is a settlement, then where are their defenses?”
“Would you believe they didn’t think they were necessary?”
“You’re putting me on.”
“Nope.”
“Wow,” Wire replies, “what a bunch of goobers. They got transport?”
“Why, what happened to yours? I mean, I say yours because I assume you didn’t just drop out of the sky.”
“Funny you should say that because I had to ditch. Shelled out a ton of credits for a PAE Aerodynamics bird and the thing up and quit on me when I got within range of the area. Some prearranged restricted airspace agreement or something. I figured it was holdover quarantine nonsense.”
Koko remembers the airspace restrictions. Bully for Sébastien for having the foresight, the fat lot of good it did him. Koko slinks a foot forward, and Wire adjusts her aim.
“You in some hurry to get dead, cupcake?”
“Not really.”
“Then stand fast and answer my question.”
“I’m sorry, which question was that?”
“Transport.”
“No. There’s no transport.”
“None at all?”
“You actually think I’d still be here if they had transport?”
“Man, how does that even
work
?”
Koko shrugs. “It’s hard to explain, but seeing that you’re now leading this ad hoc slayfest, I’m sure you can hack
their
communication systems and work yourself out a lift. That is if your de-civ collaborators don’t burn the whole place down first.”
Wire levels her weapon. “Get on your knees, Martstellar.”
Slowly, Koko does as she’s told and keeps her hands high. “Listen, I know this might seem a bit much to ask, but I was wondering… maybe you could do me a favor before you take me out.”
“A favor? For you? After everything I’ve been through tracking you down? Right now you’re lucky I don’t blast you in half.”
“Well, immediate blasting in half aside, the way I see it, it’s me you’re after, right? I’m the one who took out the other members of your recovery team back on
Alaungpaya
. I’m the one with the outstanding price on her head. Think of it as a last request. These people, they’ve got nothing to do with you and me. Leave them alone.”
Wire laughs. “Oh, that’s rich. Leave them alone. That’s really funny. Meat like this—what are these dipshits to you anyway?”
“They helped us out. Of course they also reactivated the transponder on the submarine which I’ll figure is how you found me in the first place, and they probably messed with my lover’s brain, but they helped us out nevertheless. They don’t deserve this.”
“Deserve. You know what? You know jackshit about what people deserve. I’ve studied your files, Martstellar.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah. I guess you were a decent operator back in the day. Maybe a little below salt for my tastes, but still… you should know better how this sort of thing has to play out.”
Wire then swings left and shoots Flynn twice.
As the first pulse round hornets through his right pectoral and sneezes out of his back in a molten carnation spray of tissue and scapula bone, the good news is Flynn pirouettes clockwise with enough velocity to avoid Wire’s follow-up shot.
The bad news, however, is…
Oh, c’mon—seriously? Again?
If an aspiring combatant took the time to explore the literal scores of exotic martial arts, said combatant would likely be flabbergasted by the number of methods to disarm an active shooter.
Carpal crunching Nikkyo wristlocks, crippling two-point strike and kick Silat combinations, gnarly Malla-yuddha joint breaks—the list goes on and on with meticulous, debilitating nuance and mind-splitting pain. So go ahead, take your pick. In the end the common denominator to any disarmament method is invariably uniform: once you commit, you must commit completely. Second chances in hand-to-hand combat are nil.
In the shaved instant as Wire squeezes off her second blast at Flynn, Koko springs up and cuts the distance between them. Sensing her movement, Wire tracks back to respond, but Koko is already airborne. Wire fires and a pulse round slices past Koko’s ear within a fraction.
In that fluky moment of midflight with her right arm crooked back, sadly Koko realizes she’s already made a huge mistake. Then again, committed is committed so—fuck it. She’s not going down without a fight.
Tucking her legs and spinning sixty degrees to her left, Koko talon-locks her hand on Wire’s wrist before she can squeeze the trigger again. Mashing together the ulna and radius bones, Koko prays her counterweight will be enough to redirect Wire’s line of fire, free the weapon, and possibly dislocate Wire’s shoulder. When she doesn’t feel a sudden give or hear a moist socket pop, Koko yanks hard and reverses her momentum anyway.
Wire wouldn’t have lived as long as she has if she’d not been able to defend herself against such a predictable move. With jaded ease, she breaks Koko’s hold and pitches her off her arm like an overgrown tabby. Landing on her back, Koko blacks out. A split second later and coming to, Koko is actually stunned that Wire isn’t chewing out her eye.
Rally time.
Koko revolves over two fallen Commonagers and pulls one of the bodies on top of her. It’s a last hope to shield herself, and when she sees that the empty-eyed corpse is actually Pelham, Koko’s adrenaline spikes. Heaving Pelham up onto her back, she drives herself backward.
Be as small as possible…
…be nothing…
…be the…
Zero.
A pulse round slams into Pelham’s body and the impact clobbers Koko back to the bricks with a grunt. Instantly Koko’s shoulder burns with an incredible jag of cauldron-like pressure as the penetrating round melts into her own flesh. Mocking her with rough, wolfish mirth, Wire steps forward and hovers.
“Here’s a last request,” Wire says, pointing her weapon down at the back of Koko’s thrashing head. “How about you come out from under there, and I shoot you in the spine. I’m told acute paralysis can abate some of the misery of being blasted at close range. Of course, I’ll have to crank down the levels on this pretty Sig here to make it worth both our whiles, but to tell you the truth, in the end it might make things easier. I was planning on chopping you to itty-bitty pieces for fun anyway.”
Koko claws forward with one arm, but Pelham’s weight has her trapped. Knowing the warm pooling sensation beneath her chest is her own blood, the oncoming certainty of her death purifies her mind and her pupils dilate. Somehow she’s always known that this was how it would turn out for her. Koko P. Martstellar? Grow soft-toothed, flappy, and gray? Not a chance. Everything has brought her to this moment like one achingly long joke. Still, Koko is determined not to give Wire even a morsel of satisfaction.
Bitch thinks she knows how this plays out?
Give Koko one chance.
Just one.
“Oh, well, have it your way…”
A wet, throaty snarl twists Wire’s head and a radical vision of blue-furred bloodlust roars up.
Gammy!
Knocked sideways by the crippled dog, Wire brings an arm up across her face to protect herself. A frenzied mass of canine froth, Gammy scrapes wildly up Wire’s body as Koko sweeps out a leg and hooks Wire’s calf. Gammy’s weight combined with the hooked leg takes Wire to the ground.