Perfect Dark: Second Front

by Greg Rucka

  She was going to lose, Jo realized. She was going to lose this fight. She was wounded, and Fan was faster, and, worse, Jo was beginning to realize that Fan knew all of her moves. Fan had been waiting for her to make a break for it, Fan had known that as soon as Jo had realized she’d been taken in by the hologram, she would leave her cover to find a new one.

  “Joanna?” Portia de Carcareas said. “Joanna, can you hear me?”

  She was so lost in her pain and her fear that she was certain it was her imagination.

  “Joanna, is that you? Are you fighting Chun Fan?”

  Jo edged to the side of the pillar, risked glancing around. She couldn’t see Fan, guessed that, like herself, the other woman had retreated to the shadows beneath the companion platform.

  “Portia?”

  “Is that you, Joanna? The one who looks like Mai Hem?”

  “They did something to me, they … changed me, Portia—”

  “You’ve got to calm down.”

  “They changed me, I can’t … I’m hurt … I’m going to lose, Portia, I don’t know what to—where were you?”

  “You’re not going to lose, calm down. We lost your signal, the Continuity must have been jamming it. We got it back when they began broadcasting the battle.”

  From across the Arena, Jo heard a soft, electronic beep, and her blood went cold. She knew the sound, knew that Fan had swapped out her FAC for a new weapon, for the Plasma Rifle—an experimental weapon that could fire pulses of supercharged particles that acted like directed microwaves, melting flesh and sparking off metal. Worse, it possessed an effective camouflage system, a dataDyne-proprietary light-bending apparatus that rendered the user invisible, for as long as the battery would last.

  Again, it was the choice Jo herself would have made, if she’d had the opportunity, if she’d been able to make the choice at all.

  “Jo,” Portia de Carcareas said in her head. “Listen to me. You’re fighting wrong, you’re not—”

  “Shhhh,” Jo murmured. “She’s coming. She’s cloaked.”

  Carcareas went silent for a second, then said, “Look to the right.”

  “You can see her?”

  “It’s not much of a show if we can’t see both the combatants, Joanna,” Carcareas said. “She’s in a halo in the broadcast, and you look like hell, by the way. Here she comes.”

  Jo listened, trying to hear anything but the noise of her own ragged, broken breathing.

  “Now!”

  She pivoted from the pillar, turning to her right, the Falcon out and firing blindly. There was a shimmer from the edge of the platform, and then Fan appeared. She returned fire, leaping to her left, rolling onto the stairs. Jo ducked back to cover, tossing away the emptied pistol. She could hear Fan cursing as she ran past, overhead.

  “There’s a SuperDragon to your left, behind the second to last pillar on your side. You can’t see it, it landed on its butt.”

  Jo moved, searching for the weapon, and found it where Carcareas had said it would be. The woman kept talking.

  “Firepower won’t help you, Joanna. She’s going to beat you in a straight one-on-one, that’s already clear.”

  “She knows all my moves.” Jo checked the SuperDragon, saw that the clip was fully loaded but that the grenade launcher was empty. “I try another duck-and-cover, she’ll put a bullet in my head.”

  “That’s because she’s fighting Joanna Dark. But you’re not Joanna Dark.”

  “I am, I’m—”

  “You’re Mai Hem, Jo. Use that! Use—”

  The transmission cut out with a screech of static that made Jo stagger, and she nearly lost her grip on the assault rifle. She was certain that her ears were now bleeding along with most of the rest of her.

  From above, her voice echoing, Fan said, “No no no no, Jo-Jo! That’s cheating, and there’s no cheating this time! Not this time, no cheating! No disconnects!”

  Joanna righted herself again, trying to banish the new pain that had seemed to gleefully join the rest. The sound of Fan switching out weapons echoed once more across the stone, the woman apparently swapping something heavy for something light. Jo checked the SuperDragon again, thinking that, as weapons went, she absolutely hated the assault rifle—bulky, ugly, inelegant. Given the opportunity, she would have cheerfully traded it for something accurate, something precise. Those were her weapons, that was the way she worked.

  That was the way Joanna Dark worked.

  Oh damn, she thought, and it made sense, then, such perfect sense. Carcareas had been right: Fan knew exactly how to fight Joanna Dark. Fan knew how to fight the way Jo fought—despite the woman’s abundant madness, Fan fought like Jo. She fought smart.

  But that had never been Mai Hem’s thing. That had never been what had made Mai Hem the darling of DeathMatch. Mai Hem hadn’t been smart, hadn’t ever tried to be. She had been a show, she had been the show. People hadn’t tuned into the public DeathMatch to watch the fights. They hadn’t tuned into the exclusive pay-per-view blood tournaments. They had tuned in to watch Mai Hem—sexy, gaudy, over-the-top Mai Hem, who never used a Falcon if there was a MagSec handy, who never went with a sniper’s rifle if she could find a rocket launcher. On more than one occasion, Jo had thought the woman had survived not because of skill or tactics but simply because she was so brazen and had exhibited such an utterly and completely insane disregard for her own safety.

  The real question was, which of them was more crazy? Chun Fan or Mai Hem?

  I am not Joanna Dark, Jo thought. I am Mai Hem.

  Then she tucked the stock of the SuperDragon against her hip and crushed its trigger beneath her finger. The weapon came to life, erupting with a torrent of lead, and Jo swept the barrel back and forth, firing at nothing at all and at everything at once, and she heard Mai Hem’s laugh, and, still firing, she began walking forward, out from the cover of the platform. The assault rifle went dry on her, and she tossed it aside, still walking forward, taking her time, and she saw the bead from a laser sight blur over the stone and knew that Fan had put the sights on her head. She half expected it to end right then, with a bullet through her brain, but it didn’t come.

  At the center of the Arena, Jo turned, raising her arms despite the pain that shot through her chest as she did so. Mai Hem’s dress was sleeveless, all the better to show off her muscles, and Jo stretched the way she’d seen Mai Hem herself do so many times before, the way she’d done to give the audience at home an eyeful.

  Fan, holding a Maas P9P in both hands, the beam from its laser sight bobbing slightly across Jo’s vision, stared at her.

  “Hacker girl,” Jo said. “No wonder Father never let you play.”

  Fan’s expression had been one of confusion, even astonishment, but now it melted into anger. “Shut up!”

  Jo laughed, Mai Hem’s distinctive, horrible laugh that seemed to be coming to her with more and more ease. “Make me.”

  Fan fired, missing, and Jo felt the round pass so close it burned along her scalp. It took everything she had not to flinch. She laughed again.

  Fan jumped lightly down from the platform, readjusting her sights. With an elaborate sigh, Jo turned away, presenting her back as a target. It was madness to do it, utter madness, and again she expected the punch of the bullets, the sensation of her insides being crushed open by ballistic bricks. There was a MagSec resting on one of the steps nearby, and she began walking toward it as if she had all the time in the world.

  “Turn around!” Fan shouted at her. “Turn around and look at me!”

  Without stopping, Jo raised her left hand and gave her the middle finger.

  Fan fired again, and this time the round went wider than before, smacking into the stone staircase and sending tiny shards flying through the air. The shot hit within inches of where the MagSec lay, and Jo reached out and took the pistol as if she hadn’t noticed or, better, as if she didn’t care. Still with her back to Fan, she made an elaborate show of examining the gun, picking it up in both h
ands and then holding it high, squinting along the barrel.

  “Turn around! Turn!”

  With another sigh, even more bored and heavy than the last, Jo turned around to look at Fan, letting the MagSec in her hand dangle beside her right thigh. The girl had followed her across the Arena, closing the distance between them to perhaps ten feet at the most. She still held the P9P in her hands, and now the targeting beam was swaying wildly, jumping back and forth, as if every time it found Joanna, some invisible force was making it slide away.

  “You’re not her!” Fan said. “She’s dead! You’re not her!”

  Jo licked her lips slowly, as if wetting them for a kiss, and started walking forward.

  “You’re not her!” Fan screamed, and she fired three times in succession, and one of the rounds hit Jo, taking a bite out of her left shoulder.

  Jo laughed, because that was exactly what Mai Hem would have done.

  Then she was directly in front of Fan, and with an easy swipe, she brought the heavy barrel of the MagSec up, crossing her front, hitting Fan’s hands and knocking the P9P out of the way. Before the girl could bring the gun back into line, Jo had the MagSec’s barrel hovering in front of her face.

  “You’re not her.” Fan’s eyes shone with wild confusion and terror. “You’re not her, you’re Jo-Jo.”

  “I’m not her, no,” Jo said. “But I sure as hell look like her, don’t I?”

  And then Jo did what Mai Hem would have done.

  She pulled the trigger.

  DataFlow Corporate Headquarters

  Presentation Hall A

  17 Rue de la Baume

  Paris, France

  January 30th, 2021

  The hall, at capacity, could seat 7,675 people. With the addition of standing room, perhaps another two hundred could be added to that number, but doing so risked blocking the aisles and further risked bringing the ire of the fire marshal down on the event. While the French government as a whole, and the Parisian government specifically, had no desire to antagonize or even annoy dataDyne, there was always the chance that some overzealous public employee might take it upon himself to cause trouble.

  So the aisles in Hall A were being kept clear. The seats, however, were all filled.

  Cassandra DeVries peeked out at the audience from behind the curtains at stage left and marveled at the number. It wasn’t, perhaps, that many people at all, not in the grand scheme of things. She knew, for instance, that almost three times that number were gathered outside at that very moment, crammed into the media tents, watching the video relay from inside the hall. That was just outside, here in Paris. Around the world, there were similar media tents, similar halls and ballrooms, all of them filled with people, some of them media, some of them politicians, some of them simply lucky enough or important enough to have earned an invitation to the unveiling.

  To say she had stage fright was putting it mildly. As far as Cassandra was concerned, she had stage terror.

  “Would you like some water, ma’am?” Shephard asked. “Or some tea? It’s good for your voice, I’m told.”

  Cassandra looked at the young woman with some alarm. “Is there something wrong with my voice?”

  “No, Madame Director, not at all,” Shephard said quickly. “You sound fine, I just wanted to know if there was anything I could get for you.”

  “I sound fine?”

  “You sound like you always do, Madame Director. Honestly.”

  “I think I’m fine.”

  “It’s okay to be nervous, ma’am. I certainly would be.” Shephard gave her a reassuring smile. “If there’s anything I can do?”

  “Dr. Ventura hasn’t arrived?”

  “Not that I know of, no ma’am.”

  Cassandra turned, locating Colonel Shaw who was standing some fifteen feet away, near one of the A/V consoles along the backstage wall. He had his radio to his ear—there hadn’t been time to fit him with a standard dataDyne subcutaneous—and he caught her glancing his way and acknowledged the look with a nod, then went back to his conversation.

  He looks stressed, too, Cassandra thought. The only one of us who doesn’t is Shephard. At least my instincts about her were correct.

  Shaw lowered the radio, approaching. “Ma’am?”

  “You sent someone to gather Dr. Ventura?”

  “He should be here in three minutes, ma’am,” Shaw said. “They’re just landing now.”

  “Is something wrong?”

  The colonel frowned, his eyes going toward the stage before coming back to hers. “No, ma’am, nothing for you to worry about. We’re having some … communications problems with some of the exterior guard posts, that’s all.”

  “They’re warning house lights,” Shephard interrupted. “The multimedia presentation is going to start.”

  Cassandra moved from where she had been speaking to Shaw, coming alongside Shephard once more, looking out at the stage. The rumble of noise from the house began to subside, the thousands of muted conversations all ending together. Behind her, Cassandra heard one of the access doors open, turned in time to see Edward Ventura entering, hastily smoothing his necktie. She held out a hand, beckoning him closer as Shaw moved to close the door behind him.

  “Just in time, Edward,” she whispered in his ear.

  “Yes, ma’am. Sorry, I overslept.”

  Cassandra turned to face him, straightening the knot of his necktie. “It’s all right, you’re here now.”

  She thought the man was actually blushing.

  From the speakers hidden behind the plasma screen and throughout the hall, the first notes of the dataDyne corporate anthem rang out. Cassandra saw Shephard smiling and wished that she’d had the presence of mind to ask her new director of media relations to forgo the use of the tune, though she understood why Shephard had made the decision to use it. The music was rousing—even, she supposed, inspiring—but she found the lyrics sentimental and saccharine, with its constant chorus of “Your life, our hands.”

  Cassandra leaned slightly to speak in Ventura’s ear. “Edward, what does ‘set minus one’ mean?”

  The young man glanced from where he’d been watching the video display that accompanied the corporate anthem on the plasma screen, giving her a puzzled look. “I’m sorry?”

  “Set minus one,” Cassandra whispered. “Arthur was listing it as an error when I spoke to him in the lab.”

  “His audio pickups were on? I thought I’d switched him off.”

  “Well, apparently you forgot. What does it mean? I couldn’t find a reference to it, though admittedly I didn’t have long to look.”

  Ventura frowned, thinking. “I’d think it’s referring to one of the modules, a ‘set.’ Though any module with a negative integer would be unviable in the coding sequence—he would simply ignore it.”

  “I see,” Cassandra said, and she forced herself to smile, and then to add, “Probably nothing, then. Don’t worry about it.”

  Ventura nodded, turning his attention back to the stage. The anthem had ended, the prerecorded video segment beginning. On the screen, images of the various dataDyne subsidiaries and their products began flashing by while a paternal and reasonably witty narrator launched into a self-congratulatory monologue about the corporation and its remarkable success. In every nation, in every home, the narrator told the audience proudly, dataDyne was there, making life better.

  Cassandra glanced back to Shaw, saw that the man was watching her from the post he’d taken at the door, once again speaking on his radio. With the lights now down, she had difficulty reading his expression, but it was becoming impossible to miss the tension in his posture.

  Her mind went back to what Ventura had said, about the error being a reference to a module. A nonsequential module, she realized, one that would have to be triggered if it existed outside of the numerical sequence. Why had Arthur referenced it at all? It didn’t make sense, it should never have come up.

  She wondered if it was possible, just possible, that Arthur
had been trying to tell her something.

  Something … Cassandra thought. Something is definitely wrong here.

  Not for the first time, she wished it was Anita Velez standing at the door, and not Leland Shaw.

  The music changed, switching to a different cue, and now the images flashing by on the plasma screen were of vehicles. Automobiles first, and then, of course, Carrington One, followed quickly by a montage of the null-g transports that had followed in its wake. Royce-Chamberlain/Bowman Motors got the most attention, as was appropriate as a dataDyne subsidiary. The narrator was speaking in grand terms about how the world had shrunk, how the dream of flight was now beyond commonplace. The death of the traffic jam, the narrator exclaimed, the end of air pollution, but not the end of accidents.

  The DataFlow logo appeared on the screen, the AirFlow.Net branding seal beneath it.

  “DataDyne fixed that problem, too,” the narrator was saying. “With the help of one of its most brilliant minds, Dr. Cassandra DeVries.”

  Suddenly, it was her face on the screen, a shot that Cassandra had never seen before, and she was certain it was a composite, something worked up in a lab somewhere, and not simply a photograph that she could not recall having posed for. She looked, she had to admit, stunning, so good that she could hardly recognize herself. Her eyes seemed to glow with intelligence, her smile to promise friendship and good hope to any who might ask for it. Her skin was flawless.

  She wasn’t certain if it was the photograph or the reaction from the hall that surprised her more, honestly, because the applause that accompanied the image was beyond thunderous. People were actually cheering, and a few were whistling while others shouted her name.

  “Most eligible bachelorette in the world,” Shephard whispered in her ear, seeing Cassandra’s expression. “You shouldn’t be surprised.”

  The narration was ending, music beginning to swell and the stage lights beginning to rise. Shephard was saying something else, smiling encouragement.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” the narrator said. “Please welcome to the stage the chief executive officer and director of all dataDyne and its subsidiaries, Dr. Cassandra DeVries.”