Perfect Dark: Second Front

by Greg Rucka

  Carcareas released her grip, then showed her the palm of her hand, the tiny glistening spike that was folding itself back into the titanium ring she wore.

  “Two cc’s endomorphine,” she whispered. “It won’t fix you, but at least you won’t feel any pain for a few minutes.”

  Jo nodded.

  Carcareas flipped around, still staying low, focusing her Core-Mantis eyes in an attempt to see through the fountain.

  “They’re flanking,” she whispered. “Three and three.”

  “Where’s your colonel?”

  Carcareas’s lips moved in silence, speaking to her ThroatLink before answering Jo. “Ninety seconds. We’re going to have to do this ourselves. Can you take the ones to the north?”

  “Yes,” Jo said, despite that fact that she wasn’t at all certain she could. The endomorphine had banished all her pain, but in so doing, it had taken her ability to self-evaluate, and now she truly had no clue how injured she might be. There wouldn’t be any way to tell what her body could and couldn’t do until she tested it.

  Carcareas looked to her, and Jo could see the woman was thinking the same thing, trying to conceal the doubt she was feeling. She nodded barely, then shifted again, taking the CMP back into her free hand. Jo brought her legs beneath her, tried to draw as deep a breath as she could without doing herself more harm, and found that the air came easy. She spat out a mouthful of watery blood, readjusted her grip on the two CMPs, and then launched herself forward, scanning the rooftops to the north.

  When she broke cover, there were two of them visible, trying to move quickly from atop one building to another. They had the same black body armor the group in the café had worn but carried long guns, instead of close-range room-sweepers. She felt dizzy, saw beads of light, as bright as the pearls Carcareas wore, dancing at the edges of her vision, and she heard someone shouting that they had a target, but between the swimming of her head and the expanse of the marble-floored plaza, the sound bounced about her crazily, and Jo couldn’t discern its source.

  Still sprinting forward, trying to reach the cover of a nearby building, Jo brought both CMPs up and to her left. The triggers resisted, then dropped, and she felt more than heard the weapons erupt, loosing a torrent of rounds at the two figures on the rooftop. She gave herself no chance in hell of doing any true damage to them, not with the range and the motion and the relative weakness of the CMPs’ rounds, and so she was actually surprised when one of them staggered, then pitched forward, his legs giving out beneath him.

  That was lucky, Jo thought, sliding into the shelter of a narrow doorway. Her vision was still dancing, quavering as if she was seeing everything through a heat haze. She could hear gunfire, the sound of rounds as they smacked into the building beside her, of ricochets sparking wildly from the floor of the plaza, but it all seemed distant and moving further away. She brought her right hand up, wiping her mouth with the back of it, and the blood that coated her skin was the bright red of a candied apple. She spat again, another mouthful of crimson.

  The sound of something heavy and hard rang against the ground, crossed the distance of her hearing. Jo swore, diving out of the doorway, trying to outrun the grenade. A pair of invisible hands reached out to her in mid flight, she felt her lower body slewing in the air, and she came down wrong and hard, feeling the impact and not the pain of it. Jo half rolled, half sprawled, losing her grip on the CMPs in each hand. A broad smear of blood marked where she’d come down, as if drawn in an arc by a massive paintbrush, and she knew the grenade had peppered her, but she simply couldn’t feel it.

  With a cry, she flipped onto her back, catching the CMP still slung from her shoulder in her hands. Above her, trying to draw the laser-sight from a Fairchild submachine gun onto her forehead, another dataDyne assassin leaned over the edge of the roof. Jo fired on instinct, on her back and from the hip, and watched the man’s face shield shatter, a mist of blood spattering it from within. He toppled forward, plummeted headfirst, and Jo found herself scrambling on her hands and feet for his body. A bullet slammed the ground beside her right hand, shooting shards of marble into her flesh, and she jerked her head as she felt something impact just beside her right eye.

  Sniper round, she thought, and then was pulling herself over the body of the dead man, using him for cover as she stripped the Fairchild from his death grip. She exchanged her now-emptied CMP for the weapon, brought it up to her shoulder as another round tried to find her and missed, hitting the dead man instead and making his whole body rock.

  Either the sniper was inexperienced or he was desperate, because he hadn’t moved between shots, and Jo caught sight of him, saw the curve of his back as he tried to stay below cover while readying his next shot. She switched the Fairchild to single shot, snapping out its stock and then steadying it against her shoulder while blinking rapidly to clear her vision. At this range, the targeting beam was useless to her, but she trusted the sights. When the sniper started to rise again she fired three times in quick succession, and he dropped back, either dead or soon to be, Jo didn’t know.

  She felt a vibration, realized she had been feeling it for a few seconds and that it was growing in intensity. On the ground, pieces of shattered marble and splintered wood began to shiver, then dance, like water droplets on a hot stove. Dust was kicking into the air, and Jo brought a hand up to shield her eyes. When she lowered it again she could see the CMO dropship hovering perhaps ten meters over the plaza. Its troop doors were open on each side, and in them, manning the mounted guns, Core-Mantis soldiers in their black and gold. As she watched, the gun facing her direction opened up, firing at the rooftop above her. Spent brass fell from the gun, catching in the sunlight like pieces of gold, cascading into the plaza, splashing into the fountain.

  The dropship turned in place, bringing its nose around to face her position, then lowered itself until it almost touched the ground. Soldiers leapt from each side before it came to a stop, and Jo lowered the Fairchild as two of them ran toward her. She got to her feet, putting out a hand to steady herself.

  Then Jo fell forward, and when she hit the ground this time, it hurt, and she knew the last of the endomorphine was spent. There were hands at her arms, lifting her to her feet, and then she was being half-dragged toward the dropship, combat style. When Jo looked to where she’d hit the ground, she saw more of her blood, and she wondered idly how much of it she had left to lose, because it seemed that she had been losing an awful lot of it. When she looked for Carcareas, she still couldn’t see her.

  It was when they lifted her into the dropship that the pain came back at full speed, and Jo knew that this time she really would have screamed, except there was no air for her to scream with. She tried to inhale, and it felt like her lungs had been filled with barbed wire, and she choked instead, and that made the need for air all the greater. She tried again, and it was worse, and her vision truly began to swim, its edges filling with white noise, and she wondered how it could be that she felt like she was drowning when surrounded by nothing but air.

  “Can’t breathe,” she managed to say.

  She was moved onto a bench, on her back, and she felt the dropship shudder, taking to the air again. She turned her head, caught a glimpse of Carcareas on the bench opposite her, blood running freely down the side of the woman’s face as a medic worked to stanch the flow. She met Jo’s eyes, and her own seemed to have broken, one of them still silver-gray, the other unnaturally green, and her mouth was moving, trying to tell her something, but Jo couldn’t hear her.

  A man’s hand pressed against her forehead, forced her head back, and she saw he had something in his hand, and she thought it looked a lot like a Tranq-7, the kind her father had used when they needed to sedate a bounty. A piece of ice dug into the side of her neck, seemed to eat at her skin like rot on a piece of fruit, and she realized she was losing consciousness, and she tried to fight it.

  I’m good at fighting, Joanna Dark thought. I’m good at fighting, I always win. I can beat th
is. I can still win.

  Then she dropped into oblivion.

  Carrington Institute

  Rooms of Stanley Peter Grimshaw

  London, England

  January 25th, 2021

  “What the hell just happened?” Steinberg demanded. “What the hell happened to the feed?”

  Grimshaw’s fingers flew over his projected keyboard, his hunt-and-peck style as rapid-fire as ever, before stopping to readjust his eyeglasses and stare at his monitor. The screen, which had only moments before been a riot of colored horizontal threads that had jumped, shimmied, and pulsed, now displayed only a single flatline. Over the speakers linked to the computer, instead of Jo and Carcareas’s voices, came only the gentle hiss of empty air.

  “Did the hack go down?” Steinberg asked. “On the ThroatLink? Did you lose the ThroatLink?”

  Grimshaw shook his head slightly, resumed typing in a flurry. It couldn’t be over. Not after the magic Grim had worked to track down Carcareas’s ThroatLink and tap in—cross-referencing thousands of communications between CMO operatives, until he uncovered the socket to “Elena Iseli,” the internal alias for the enigmatic Portia de Carcareas.

  Steinberg stared at the monitor, trying to will the single line to split once more, to dance again with the sound of Joanna Dark’s voice, distorted and crossed with static. It hadn’t been easy to hear her, and it had been only marginally easier to make out Carcareas, herself, especially once the shooting had started, but there had been sound, they’d had the link.

  And now it was gone, and even though he hated himself for it, the doubt had taken seed.

  Steinberg continued to stare at the monitor and tried to put a name to what he was suddenly feeling. It was a peculiar sensation, similar in memory to others, but not quite like anything he had ever felt before. Like someone had shoved a balloon into his chest, then rapidly inflated it with ice. Like free-falling before letting his parachute open, except he was still standing in the middle of Grimshaw’s cluttered and jumbled room in the Institute Residence Building. Like tumbling in a crashing car, back before null-g made gravity less of a problem.

  It was not unlike what he’d felt the first time he’d ever gone into combat, the mix of pure terror and pure exhilaration that came before training and instinct took over.

  And it was, he realized, an awful lot like heartbreak.

  “She’s not dead, Grim,” Steinberg said. “She’s not. You’ve got to get the feed back.”

  Grimshaw gave up at the keyboard, shoved himself back in his chair. He was agitated, clearly, and there was a stress in his voice when he spoke that Steinberg took, at first, to be a shared fear for Joanna.

  “The link’s dead, Jon. There’s no signal at all, there’s nothing.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure. It’s not broadcasting, do you get it? It’s a dead link, which means Carcareas’s probably dead, too.”

  “I don’t give a rat’s ass about Carcareas. We’ve got to get Jo back.”

  Grimshaw turned in his seat, and his expression surprised Steinberg with the depth of its fear.

  “She’s not dead, Grim,” Steinberg said again, trying to reassure him. “You’ve never seen Jo in the field. I have. A dataDyne hit team, even in her condition, she would’ve found a way out of it, especially if she knew CMO backup was on the way. She’s not dead.”

  Grimshaw shook his head rapidly, as if to say that Steinberg was wrong, that Steinberg was missing the point altogether. Then he rose from his chair and started past the other man for the door.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Steinberg moved, putting himself between the hacker and the exit. “We’re not done, Grim! We’ve got to get her back, we’ve got to find out where she is.”

  Grimshaw continued forward, trying to dodge around Steinberg, clearly agitated. Steinberg stepped back, blocking the doorway entirely.

  “Jon, get out of my way, man! We’ve got to talk to the Old Man!”

  “Are you out of your mind?” Steinberg asked. “What the hell’s gotten into you? Jo needs our help! Sit the hell back down, Grim, start hacking Tachi-Amosa’s ThroatLink, something!”

  “It doesn’t matter!” Grimshaw tried for the door again, this time actually reaching out for the knob, then jerking his hand back as Steinberg knocked it out of the way. The look on his face was bordering on hysteria. “There’s nothing we can do! We have to tell the Old Man! We have to tell him what we’ve learned!”

  This isn’t about Jo, Steinberg realized. He’s spooked by something else entirely.

  “We’re not going to the Old Man,” Steinberg said.

  Then the door behind them opened, and from the look on Grimshaw’s face, Steinberg knew who it was.

  “No need,” Daniel Carrington said. “The Old Man has come to you.”

  Carrington made them accompany him back across the Institute grounds to his office before letting either of them speak. Steinberg suspected there were two reasons for this, both of which he understood, but only one of which he felt was necessary. The first was that Carrington most likely found Grimshaw’s personal quarters distasteful, and Steinberg couldn’t fault him for that. The man wasn’t prudish—and if what Jo had said about Carrington’s prior relationship with Cassandra DeVries was to be believed, he was probably quite the opposite—but he was certainly reserved. Dressing down his chief programmer as well as his head of operations while surrounded by the cheesecake that adorned Grimshaw’s walls would have probably made him uncomfortable, not to mention diminished his authority.

  That was Steinberg’s guess, at any rate.

  The second reason was far more practical. By making them wait, Carrington was letting both Steinberg and Grimshaw soak in their own juices, so to speak. To Steinberg, who understood the tactic, it made little difference. Grimshaw was another matter. Throughout their walk, Steinberg heard the hacker muttering to himself, and it didn’t sound good at all. By the time they’d actually reached Carrington’s office, Steinberg was beginning to wonder if Grimshaw wasn’t in danger of losing it altogether.

  Carrington rested his walking stick against the side of his desk, then took his time coming around to his seat and settling in. He didn’t offer either of them chairs, and when Grimshaw went for one, he was stopped with a growl.

  “I didn’t say you could sit, Stanley,” Carrington hissed.

  Grimshaw looked like he’d been slapped, and it wasn’t solely due to the reprimand. To Steinberg’s knowledge, Daniel Carrington had never used Grimshaw’s Christian name before.

  Carrington leveled his gaze at Steinberg, the bags under his eyes heavy and dark, making the glare all the more potent. For several seconds he didn’t speak, and Steinberg waited it out. Beside him, Grimshaw shuffled, staring at his feet.

  “Where is she now?” Carrington said, softly.

  “We don’t know,” Steinberg said.

  “You don’t know.”

  “We lost her. We were trying to reacquire her when you interrupted us.”

  One of Carrington’s bushy eyebrows crept slowly higher at Steinberg’s choice of words.

  “Oh,” Carrington said, just as quietly as before. “I interrupted you, did I? Under siege for seven days, you let Joanna walk out of here to raise all sorts of Cain in the world, but I interrupted you.”

  Steinberg bit back his immediate response, then decided to hell with it, the worst the man could do was fire him.

  “That is what you wanted her to do, sir, isn’t it?”

  Carrington’s other eyebrow crept up to match the first before both of them fell once more to their accustomed positions. “You presume an awful lot, Jonathan. An awful lot.”

  Steinberg thought about that for a moment, and it seemed to him that he actually didn’t presume much at all, but he thought keeping that to himself might be the wiser course. Beside him, Grimshaw was still staring at the floor, now worrying the carpet with the toe of his left sneaker. His breathing was growing more rapid, and Stei
nberg wondered if the hacker wasn’t about to have a panic attack, or worse.

  “Where did you lose her?” Carrington asked.

  “Veracruz, Mexico,” Steinberg said. “She’d made contact with a high-level CMO operative, name of Elena Iseli, previously known to us as Portia de Carcareas.”

  “The woman from New York.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Iseli is her real name, then?”

  “Yes, sir. We were able to capture audio off of most the conversation, but there was a complication before things really got started. A dataDyne hit team arrived on the scene. I think it’s pretty clear the target was Agent Dark, and not Iseli. There was an intense exchange of fire, to what result we don’t know. Iseli called in CMO backup to cover exfil for herself and Agent Dark—they’re very interested in Jo, sir, I’m not sure exactly why. They’d broken the ambush and were pinned down when the feed on the ThroatLink cut out. We have no intelligence on the resolution of the fight. It’s possible that Iseli is dead.”

  Steinberg expected Carrington to ask about Joanna, then, about her status before the feed had died, but he didn’t. Instead, he asked, “And what did Agent Dark learn?”

  Steinberg needed a second, felt the familiar surge of anger that was becoming the requisite emotion in all conversations with Carrington regarding Joanna Dark.

  “CMO claims they’re not responsible for the deaths of Bricker and Matsuo,” Steinberg said. “It sounded like Iseli honestly believed that Jo had done them gratis, as an attempt to earn CMO favor for a possible defection.”

  For the first time, the quiet anger that had been simmering in Carrington’s expression seemed to drain away, and he moved his eyes from where they’d been fixed on Steinberg’s to a position past the man’s shoulder, focusing on the opposite wall. He blinked slowly, almost sleepily.