Free Koko Takes a Holiday by Kieran Shea

building collapse in Luxembourg, she can’t be sure.
    Koko braces herself against the sink.
    Delacompte.
    Sending an SI security team and now some bounty agent to take her out? What, over some vendor infraction with a couple of vacationing Kongercat re-civs? This has to be some kind of a mistake. It doesn’t make sense.
    Standing there, Koko recollects a time when she accidentally met up with Delacompte at an airbase near the last played-out wells of the Samotlor oil fields. At the time, Koko hadn’t shared any duty assignments with Delacompte for a few cycles, and she remembers they were both powering on toward separate syndicate actions: Koko heading to a six-week deployment on lignite resource operations in Aduun Chuluu, and Delacompte locked in on an unclassified government assassination. It was, as they say, just one of those things. A chance crossing of paths on a layover, duly forgettable.
    Delacompte claimed her assignment was to be one of her last stints in the field and the hefty payday was more than going to cover her tuition at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques in Paris. What was it Delacompte said she was going to specialize in? Oh yeah, that’s right: restorative consumption patterns. Whatever that meant. Strapped up tight in their BDUs, they were throwing back drinks at the airbase bar when Delacompte shared the news she was planning to pull the plug on her military career.
    * * *
    “Wow, so Portia Delacompte is giving up the life? Well, I can’t say that I’m totally shocked. Always knew you were headed for something better than the rest of us, Big D. Someplace special.”
    “Can’t fight forever,” Delacompte said. “And you and I both know there’s no real future in all this. Think about it. Over the long haul, doing the dirty work on planet restructuring for the corporate masters and their sock-puppet governments? You’ve seen the life-expectancy charts for humps like us. Sooner or later, we all go down. And when we do, we go down ugly.”
    “Says the Miss Officer Class here buying the drinks.”
    Delacompte frowned. “Don’t give me that shit. Yeah, I’m raking in the officer credits these days, but so fucking what? I’ve earned it. Don’t forget, I’m a lot older than you, Martstellar, and I’ve been lucky too. Sure, you stay with it and quit bucking the systems, maybe you too can get promoted someday, but then what, huh? Answer me that. Trust me, girl, being an officer ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. Just penury of a different color, and me, I want more out of the time I got left.”
    “You’re not that old.”
    “Cresting thirty-four, babe.”
    “Oh, boo-hoo-hoo. You look great.”
    “Thanks.” Delacompte stabbed her finger on the top of the bar. “But what about you, huh? Don’t you want something better than this?”
    Delacompte’s question made Koko uncomfortable. What was she talking about? More than being a soldier for hire? Honestly, Koko didn’t know. Commercial mercenary work was what Koko had trained for. It’d been her life, her entire world, and she felt she was good at it. Even in her rare free moments of reflection, Koko never truly considered anything other than the next mission that came down the pike or her mind-numbing times off on leave. Yeah, the grind sometimes got her down, but Koko assumed that was just part of being a warrior on call. After all, she was engineered in the third reconstruction collectives. At fifteen she tested average intelligence, but received high marks for stamina and physicality. What else was she supposed to do? Work in some goddamn re-civ manufacturing plant? Be a passive service worker and click off time in an underpaid, trenched existence like an ordinary schmo? No way.
    Koko tried to change the subject.
    “Well, my hat’s off to you anyway, D,” Koko said. “I mean, if I had a hat. Hey, do tactical helmets count as hats?”
    “You didn’t answer my question.”
    Koko swallowed an inch of poison from her glass and