Perfect Dark: Second Front

by Greg Rucka

  “I said no collateral damage, and I meant it. Best case scenario at this time has dataDyne taking a hit, and Velez is correct when she says that could have a profound impact in every part of the world.”

  “That’s still better than the worst case scenario, sir.”

  “I agree. If it comes to that, you are weapons free. Arthur cannot—repeat—cannot go live.”

  Steinberg looked across to where Velez was seated, now wearing blue jeans and a black leather jacket hastily scavenged from one of his female troopers’ locker at the Institute. It was inappropriate dress for the event, but going with plainclothes was a better option than marching into DataFlow wearing the Carrington colors. She’d taken the same weapons the rest of them had, was currently double-checking the fit of the silencer to her P9P. In addition to the pistol and the Fairchild, she’d taken a combat knife.

  “Sir,” Steinberg said, watching Velez as she worked. She didn’t look up, and he hoped to God that meant that she couldn’t hear him. “I need to know if I’m authorized to fire on Dr. DeVries.”

  There was a pause before Carrington responded. “Negative, Jon.”

  “If she’s the one to throw the switch on this thing, sir—”

  “I repeat, negative. You are not authorized to fire on Cassandra. If it comes to that, the world can burn, do you understand me?”

  If it comes to that, the world damn well will, Steinberg thought. And if it comes to that, I’m putting a bullet in her, I don’t care if you’re still in love with her or not.

  “Understood, sir,” Steinberg said. “Goldilocks out.”

  It was a truth that Steinberg had discovered early on during his career in the military: when things went to hell, they went to hell as fast as they possibly could.

  “It’s genius,” Carrington had said as he’d led him and Velez from his office, moving as fast as his bulk and his leg would allow him. “A computer that can take plain language instruction, that can be told the result you desire and then self-propagate the programming necessary to achieve it. Cassandra and I discussed the possibility of such a machine often, but in theory only, never in practice. The difficulties in parsing speech alone are enormous, but to then implement such instructions as effective, nonbugged code, it becomes an astronomical undertaking.”

  “But she’s done it?” Steinberg said. “That’s Arthur?”

  “So it would seem.”

  “Arthur is a limited AI,” Velez said. “As I explained, he has no sense of self.”

  “But he can implement plain language direction, and that’s why Cass is using him for AirFlow 2.” They’d reached the elevator, and Carrington jabbed the call button with his thumb, then turned to face Velez. “The idea is that he can create his own programming to compensate for any variables in traffic, be they increases in volume, changes in direction, even alterations due to environmental factors. Tied into the global network, able to monitor every single null-g vehicle fitted with a dataDyne transponder—and that’s almost all of them—Arthur would know, for instance, if an ambulance had been dispatched to an address in midtown Manhattan and could thus reroute corresponding traffic to allow for the fastest travel time.”

  “Yes,” Velez said. “That’s my understanding.”

  The elevator arrived, and Carrington lumbered inside, Steinberg and Velez following.

  “Suppose Arthur decided, for whatever reason, that he didn’t want to do that, Miss Velez,” Carrington said. “What then?”

  “The traffic pattern would remain the same.”

  “No, you’re thinking about him as a machine, not as a thinking machine. No sense of self, no sense of conscience. Arthur doesn’t wish to execute the command, what does he do?”

  “He ignores it.”

  “Correct.” Carrington looked to Steinberg. “Now consider the following. You’re a group of children who are, for all intents and purposes, a cult. Your leader is Zhang Li. He gives you everything you could desire, everything you need. He is your alpha and your omega. And all he asks in return is that you program for him, you hack for him. Any machine anywhere, if he wants it, your job is to get it for him.”

  “I get anything I want?” Steinberg said.

  “I’m Zhang Li,” Carrington said, as the elevator came to a stop. “I can give it to you, so, yes, anything.”

  “I do whatever you ask,” Steinberg said.

  Velez, hustling alongside, shook her head. “I don’t understand. What does any of this have to do with Master Li?”

  Carrington ignored her, still speaking to Steinberg. “You do whatever I ask. Then I die. What happens to you?”

  “Zhang Li is dead?” Velez asked. “You know this?”

  “He’s been dead for several months,” Carrington said. “He’s your reason for living, and he’s gone. You’re a cult of spoiled children, and your father is dead. What do you do?”

  Steinberg shook his head.

  “You do what spoiled children do when they don’t get their way,” Carrington said. “You break things.”

  “You mean Arthur.”

  “You’re not thinking big enough, Jon, that’s always been your problem. We’re talking about Zhang Li, the founder of dataDyne.”

  “All right, you break dataDyne.”

  Carrington shook his head, annoyed. His cheeks, Steinberg had noted, had turned pink, and he was wheezing slightly from the exertion of the pace he’d set. They were crossing the grounds to the Main Building, now, and Steinberg assumed they were heading to the Ops Center.

  “You break the world,” Carrington said. “Because the world belonged to Zhang Li, or so he liked to believe.”

  “If they were his children, his cult, they would be loyal to dataDyne,” Velez said, adamantly.

  “Not everyone shares your sense of duty, Miss Velez. We’re talking about children. They didn’t know from dataDyne, they knew from Zhang Li, and they knew dataDyne was his. But it’s not anymore, not as far as they’re concerned. It’s Cassandra’s now, and they can’t stand the thought of that. If Zhang Li can’t have the world, no one can have it.”

  “I still don’t see how—” Steinberg started to say.

  “Arthur isn’t an AI, Jon, he’s a weapon of mass destruction.” Carrington stopped, out of breath. “AirFlow.Net is ubiquitous, the world’s largest computer network. But Arthur is about to be plugged into that network. He can control every vehicle with a dataDyne transponder. Imagine it. Imagine them crashing all at once.”

  Steinberg could, or at least thought he could, his mind suddenly filled with visions of null-g vehicle after null-g vehicle abruptly plummeting from the sky, crashing one after another into the ground. How many null-g vehicles were there? Millions of them, there had to be, maybe hundreds of millions of them—they were as omnipresent as the automobiles they’d replaced once were.

  “Now,” Carrington said, softly. “Imagine what they crash into, Jon. The White House. The Kremlin. Nuclear power plants. Oil refineries. Schools. Hospitals. Army bases. Missile silos. High-rises. Bridges. Homes.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Steinberg said.

  “Now imagine them doing it all at once,” Carrington whispered. “All around the globe, in every nation.”

  “It’s insanity,” Velez said. “It’s beyond insanity, it’s nihilism.”

  “That is exactly what it is,” Carrington agreed. “The end of all things. If Zhang Li can’t have it, no one can.”

  They’d crossed the water and Steinberg felt the dropship descending slightly. He broke out of his harness, pulled himself to his feet, and moved to the open troop door on the port side. Looking down, he could see the city of Rouen rushing past beneath their feet. He stepped back, hating the height, then keyed the headset again.

  “Calvin?”

  “Go ahead, Jon.”

  “Velez has a landing site for us, you want to come in from the north.”

  “Give it to me.”

  “Some park on the Allée de la Comtesse de something or other.”
r />   “The Comtesse de Ségur, yeah, I know the one.”

  “You do?”

  “Emily was telling me about it.”

  “Ah.”

  “GPS says we’ll be there in eight minutes.”

  Steinberg checked his watch. It was already seventeen past eleven in the morning. According to Velez, Arthur would be switched on at noon, or damn near close to it, at least.

  “Faster would be good,” he told Rogers, and then he went back to his seat on the bench and began affixing the suppressor to the end of his Fairchild, ordering the rest of his troopers to do the same.

  There wasn’t a doubt in his mind that they’d be needing them before the hour was up.

  Home of Former dataDyne CEO

  Zhang Li (Deceased)

  38km SW Li Xian, Sichuan Province

  People’s Republic of China

  January 30th, 2021

  Jo found herself in trouble immediately.

  The Arena had barely finished resolving before Chun Fan charged at her, sprinting across the smooth stone floor of the Arena with a shriek of rage, then leaping into the air with what, to Jo, was the obvious intention of putting the heel of her right shoe into the center of Joanna’s throat. Jo snapped her hands up into a rising cross-block, once again appalled by the sight of Mai Hem’s hot-pink lacquered fingernails as her own, and had just enough time to realize that Fan had feinted.

  Instead of extending her right leg for the kick, the insane young woman was folding it back, beneath herself, and then her left shot out as if fired from a cannon. Jo tried to twist out of the blow, felt the heel of one of Mai Hem’s useless boots snapping beneath her feet, and then felt ribs that had up until that point been behaving themselves explode in a riot of pain. The world vanished, as if some bug in the program made the Arena, and Joanna, both cease to exist for a moment. Then she was back, and she knew she was lying on her back, because her view of Fan was from below the woman.

  “You’re already beaten,” Fan hissed at her, still speaking Mandarin. Then, to make her point, she stomped on the bullet wound in Jo’s abdomen.

  Jo thought that her pain sounded just like Mai Hem’s had when she had killed her for the second time.

  Her vision swam, blurred, and what breath she was holding fled. She tried to get up, to use her legs, and the muscles in her belly and the pain in her ribs made it clear that doing so was going to be impossible, and then she was being kicked again, and she was certain that her ribs would never heal. Choking for lack of air, she rolled toward the source of the last kick, nearly flailing, and somehow caught Fan’s leg before she could fire it off again. Jo kept rolling into it, trapping the leg and hoping against hope that Fan would be too stubborn to move, that she would let Jo break the joint.

  Fan fell backward instead, dropping smoothly to the floor and pulling the leg free with the momentum. Jo was on her belly now and getting her hands beneath her, tracking the crazy young woman. Fan hadn’t stopped, had gone from the fall into a backflip, and before Jo was even to her knees, the girl had planted herself back on her feet. Jo saw the shine of blood on Fan’s jumpsuit, took meager comfort in the fact that, apparently, all the young woman’s jumping around had torn open the wound in her belly, as well. Jo tried to brace for the next attack, knowing that if it was another kick to the ribs, the fight would be all but over.

  Yet Fan didn’t attack, instead bouncing lightly back on the balls of her feet, putting more distance between them.

  “I could always beat you, Mai-Mai,” Fan said. “Hand-to-hand, guns or knives, I’ve always owned you.”

  Jo coughed, saw cherry-red blood spattering lightly onto the stone floor. Mai Hem’s blood, her blood, it was the same. The battering she’d already taken had moved her off the center of the arena, toward the line of pillars that supported the platforms ringing the edge of the space. She put a hand out for support, got painfully to her feet, then almost fell again when she put her weight down on the broken heel of her right boot.

  Fan was continuing to back away, putting the breadth of the Arena between them. From somewhere beyond the space came the sound of wind chimes, and suddenly small pockets of rippling air began to coalesce all about them.

  The weapons were arriving. From the corner of Jo’s eye, she saw a Falcon 2 pistol shimmer into existence, perhaps twenty feet from where she stood, near the base of another pillar. Above, on the platform, a ballistic vest came into existence, toppling as it fell over. Behind her, she heard the clatter of more metal, something heavier landing on the stone, a submachine gun or assault rifle. There was the distinctive sound of a blade ringing out, followed immediately by another one, as two combat knives dropped out of nothing and into their shared reality.

  Fan smiled at her, and then, as quickly as she had before, went for the steps nearest where she was standing, racing up to the second level, opposite.

  With effort, Jo pulled herself around the pillar, into the shadow cast by the platform above her. She waited half a second, then lurched forward, moving further into the darkness, until she reached the boundary wall. She cut to her right, turning, trying to keep the pillars between herself and the opposite platform, knowing that her ridiculous clothing was making her all the easier to spot, despite the shadows. She didn’t see Fan, but she didn’t need to; she knew what the other woman was doing, knew that the girl was taking her time to choose her weapon.

  Jo used the wall at her back as support, reached down, and pulled off her boots, first the left, then the right. The pain in her chest and belly was enough to make her eyes tear, and it took two tries to remove them both. She steadied herself, trying to keep her breathing shallow and rapid, then reached again, this time for the hem of her absurd half-and-half dress. It was made of silk, swathes of it opaque pink, other patches entirely translucent, designed to be almost, but not quite, entirely revealing. Hissing against the pain, she tore the edge of the dress, freeing her legs.

  “Mai-Mai! Come out and play!”

  Jo raised her head, trying to find the voice, found that she couldn’t. It was the nature of the Arena, the way it bent sound, made it unreliable with echoes and reverberation. Nothing in the Arena was there to make the battle easy, that was part of its design. The open space at its center was a killing floor, there for hand-to-hand or a straight-up shoot out. The platforms existed to provide both cover and perches to shoot from. The whole location was designed for the contest, to make it brutal and to let the audience see as much of it as possible.

  She stifled another cough, quietly spat out a second mouthful of blood, then looked around for a weapon. She caught the faint shine of metal to her right, perhaps twelve feet away, and started toward it, feeling the texture of the stone floor through her silk-stockinged feet.

  A gun, Jo thought. Just give me a gun.

  Then she saw what it was, and the despair she felt threatened to eclipse the pain. Painfully, Jo went to one knee and picked up the weapon. It was a wrist crossbow, the Javelin model, loaded with a five-quarrel magazine.

  This is so not fair, she thought as she fastened it into place on her sleeve.

  Somewhere in the Arena, she heard the heavy clack of a bolt being run back on a weapon. Too loud to be a Fairchild, maybe from an assault rifle, the FAC-16 or the Kangxi.

  There was movement out of the corner of her eye, and Jo spun, heedless of what it did to her wounded belly, saw Fan landing lightly on the floor of the Arena, beyond the shelter of the platform. She was carrying two weapons, a CMP and the FAC-16, and as she righted herself, she dropped the CMP, preparing to bring the FAC up into a firing position with both her hands. She’d gone with the weapon Jo would have chosen herself, Jo realized.

  Jo dropped left, firing twice from the Javelin, and just as she loosed the second quarrel, she realized she’d been had. Each of her shots passed harmlessly through the image of Fan, leaving the hologram unaffected.

  Stupid! Stupid stupid stupid failure!

  She should have seen that coming, she should have
accounted for that. It was the same trick she’d used in Veracruz, it was the same thing her father had always warned her about, to take nothing for granted. And she’d fallen for it, and she had failed him. She had shamed him, she had brought dishonor on his house.

  From her left, Fan opened up with the FAC, the rifle barking again and again, and Jo went into a shoulder roll, came out of it between two of the pillars. Bullets spat off the stone, sparking and whining. Without breaking stride, she ran forward with all the speed she could muster, out into the open center of the Arena. From somewhere behind her, she heard Fan shouting in glee.

  “Run! Run away from me, you miserable cow!”

  The Falcon 2 that she’d seen earlier was still on the ground, resting enticingly on the stone, and she knew it would hurt, but she knew she had to have that gun. The FAC opened up again, a second torrent of rounds chasing after her, and Fan was tracking her with the spray, and she prayed that the girl was aiming high. Jo shifted her balance to her heels, let her hips fall behind her legs, and the silk stockings covering her feet did what she knew they would, slipping on the stone even as they tore. She let herself fall into the slide, feeling the friction burn of the smooth stone along her bare thigh, hearing the rounds cutting the air over her head as she went down.

  Then Jo had the Falcon in her hand, and she turned onto her belly even as she continued to slide, shouting out with the pain, trying to use it, and she saw Fan. The woman had taken a position beside one of the pillars, near where Jo had been hiding, using the stonework as a support. Jo fired twice, then twice more, and two of the shots hit the girl square in the sternum, and she staggered back but didn’t drop, and Jo realized that Fan had taken the body armor, as well.

  Her slide ended with her beneath the opposite platform from where she’d started, and instead of trying to regain her feet, she simply rolled behind the nearest pillar. Once she had her back to it, she used her legs to push herself upright. She was out of breath, and when she stopped moving, the pain hit her like a freight train.