Perfect Dark: Initial Vector Page 19

  “I’m sure you are, love.” Foster gathered the Falcon and the spent clips, gave her a broad and genuine smile, then turned and departed the range.

  As soon as the door to the range clicked shut, Jo heard the buzzer sound again, saw fresh targets descend, launching into a new dance.

  She took the MagSec up and joined them.

  “Potts was impressed,” Steinberg told her as they walked from the firing range to the combat suite housed on the ground floor of the Institute Main Buildings. “Which is saying a lot, because very little impresses that man.”

  “He didn’t act like it,” Jo said.

  “He smiled.”

  “And that’s rare, is it?”

  “He’s never smiled at me.” Steinberg consulted the PDA in his hand, reviewing the results of her range time. “He’s qualified you on most Institute-approved weaponry, and rated you ‘master’ on over half of them. Ninety to ninety-five percent accuracy, across the board.”

  “He plays dirty, or else it would be one hundred percent,” Jo said. “Mixes up the targets, randomizes their sequencing.”

  “Of course he plays dirty, Jo. So does the enemy.”

  “I’m just saying that I can do better.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about it.”

  “But I can do better, Jonathan, I can score one hundred percent across the board.”

  He tapped a score on the PDA. “Not if you keep refusing to use the Magnum.”

  “I hate that gun,” she said, her expression darkening a bit.

  “The DY’s a good gun. I use it myself,” he replied. “I’ve seen you handle everything else, so why not—”

  “Why not drop it?” she snapped. “If you need to compensate for something by fondling your big shiny gun, that’s your business. Leave me out of it.”

  They’d reached the suite, and Steinberg tucked his PDA into its holster on his belt, began tapping in a sequence on the keypad beside the door. “Memorize this.”

  Jo watched his fingers on the pad, saying, “I can do better.”

  “You passed, you’re fully qualified. Don’t fret it.”

  The door clicked open, parting down its center with a pneumatic hiss.

  “What’re we doing now?”

  “What was the code I just used to open the door?”

  “Star-zed-three-three-eight-seven-one-seven-nine-sevenfour-six,” Jo said, rattling off the sequence without bothering to hide her own impatience. “What’re we doing now?”

  “I want to check your tacticals,” Steinberg said, leading the way into the darkened suite. Slowly, lights began coming up along the walls, revealing a black room, blue grid lines drawn across its every surface. “You’re going to do some combat drills.”

  “You’ve already seen me in combat.”

  “This will be different.” Steinberg moved to an apparently featureless portion of the wall, pressing a button that, until that moment, had remained unseen. A panel slid back, revealing a rack of Fairchild DW-P5s, and a selection of VR goggles.

  “Different how?”

  “Group tactics, small unit movement, things like that.” He pulled one of the Fairchilds down, checked it quickly, then handed it to Jo.

  Jo frowned, taking the weapon and examining it. It had been modified for virtual training, outfitted to simulate the real thing. “I’m no good at that kind of thing.”

  “You’re good at everything else, why not this?”

  “It’s not … it’s not what I do, I don’t work well in a team.”

  Steinberg arched an eyebrow. “You worked with your father, Jo.”

  “That was different.”

  “Your problem,” Steinberg said, handing her a set of the goggles and then brushing past her toward another portion of wall, this one with a touchscreen built in, “is that you’re afraid to let anyone see you make a mistake.”

  The comment stung, mostly because Jo realized it was true. “I just don’t think I should be evaluated on something that I’ve little experience in, that’s all. It’s not a fair evaluation.”

  Steinberg chuckled to himself, began tapping in commands on the touchscreen. “Straight-A student, weren’t you? Classic overachiever.”

  “I don’t think there’s anything wrong in wanting to be good at the things that you do,” Jo said tightly.

  “You don’t want to just be good, Jo, you want to be perfect.” He squinted at the screen, muttered a curse. “Grimshaw’s been down here, tweaking the programs. Should be a couple of surprises in store for you.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with that, either,” Jo said. “With wanting to be perfect.”

  “Sure there is, especially when you’re letting someone else set the standards. Life’s not about perfection, it’s about making the best out of what you’ve got.”

  “Do you eat at a lot of Chinese food, Jonathan?” Jo asked sweetly.

  Steinberg finished inputting commands into the touchscreen, looked at her quizzically. “What?”

  “Keep your fortune-cookie philosophy to yourself, please, thank you.”

  “Hit a nerve?”

  “You couldn’t hit a nerve if you were laser-guided to the target.”

  “‘The lady doth protest too much, methinks.’” His grin had grown, clearly amused, and Jo found it all the more infuriating. “It’s one thing to want to prove how good you are to yourself. It’s something else entirely to allow another to determine your self-worth.”

  “And I do that, do I? You suddenly know me that well?”

  “I know you better than you think, hell yeah. I know you’re looking for approval, and that you didn’t get it—or at least, get enough of it—from your father, and now you’re hoping to get it from Carrington.”

  Jo felt her cheeks beginning to burn.

  “If I were you, Mister Steinberg,” she said very quietly, “I would seriously consider shutting up now.”

  His grin disappeared, as she saw that he’d realized he’d pushed too far, too hard. He put his attention back on the touchscreen, tapped it lightly a final time with his index finger.

  “Program will start in thirty seconds,” Steinberg told her. “Follow the squad leader, obey his orders, I’ll be watching on the monitors outside.”

  He stepped past, exiting the room with a new swish of the doors.

  What do you know? Jo thought, glaring after him. What do you know about me, anyway?

  One of the squares on the grid was blinking for her attention, switching alternately from blue to black. Jo switched the VR goggles to active-receive, settled them over her eyes, plugging each earpiece into place, adhering the sensory feeds to either side of her neck, just below the collar of her T-shirt. A computerized voice asked her to please take position for the start of the simulation. With the Fairchild in her hands, she moved to the blinking square, and the blue light switched to red, turned constant.

  The lights in the room went out and her vision split, unwrapped like an origami crane, revealing an urban war zone at night. Cars burned on rubble-strewn streets, spilling black smoke so full of oil she could taste it in the back of her throat. Sirens were blaring in the distance, echoing along alleys and empty streets. Jo glanced down, saw that she was now wearing the standard Carrington Institute tactical gear, black and blue BDUs, combat boots, a ballistic vest. A number glowed green over her right breast—“3”—presumably her position in the squad.

  She looked around, noting the position of her fellow squadmembers. All were dressed and armed as she was, all of them combat-ready. There were four of them in total, including Jo, and the other three appeared to have been modeled on Carrington Institute personnel. The woman at her left flank bore a disconcerting resemblance to Emily Partridge, but with substantially larger breasts.

  Grimshaw, Jo thought.

  The other members of the team were spread out ahead of her. The nearest, perhaps three meters away and now crouching down behind the back of an overturned automobile, seemed to be a strange mixture of Osgood Potts’s head
attached to Calvin Rogers’s body. Leading the squad was a man who had obviously been modeled on Steinberg himself.

  Jo idly considered shooting him in the back, but thought better of it. She was furious with him, true, but putting a simulated bullet into his simulated back was probably taking things a little too far.

  Steinberg motioned for the squad to move up, using his left hand to issue hand signals. Jo crouched, moving to the nearest cover, following their advance. Past her, the faux Partridge was covering their rear.

  The Steinberg simulant raised his left hand again, this time showing two fingers, then pointing to his left side at a doorway down the block. The simulant Rogers immediately moved to comply. Steinberg added a third finger, then pointed to the opposite side of the street, the edge of a nearby alley.

  Jo moved, fast and low, to the position indicated, checking the alleyway before crossing its mouth and moving to take cover against the far corner. A rattle of automatic-weapons fire echoed from somewhere in the distance, its direction impossible to discern. She heard someone sobbing from an apartment above her, the sound of an infant wailing.

  Gunshots cracked nearby, from the direction they had come, and Jo jerked back, seeing the Rogers and Steinberg simulants both dropping low, bringing their weapons around. Partridge was taking fire from one of the windows lining the street, the rounds sparking off the asphalt all about her. The Steinberg simulant shouted to give covering fire, and Jo and Rogers both loosed bursts at the window, shattering the glass. Partridge tumbled and went down, hit in the back of the knee. When she went down, she screamed.

  The firing from above stopped, as did their own, and the city noise came back into focus, muted, as if everything and everyone around them was waiting for the next move. Partridge was trying to pull herself off the street to safety, sobbing to herself.

  Jo reloaded, crossing the mouth of the alley again, back the way she came, and she saw Steinberg from his position on the opposite side of the street, waving her back. Jo glared at him and he made a cutting motion across his throat with his left hand, telling her to stop. She ignored him, sprinting across the street, and there was an immediate burst from above as she drew the fire, and again, Steinberg and Rogers returned it.

  Jo reached Partridge, grabbing hold of the back of her vest with her left hand. Rounds shattered cement and brick around her, spitting up shards that bit at her hands and face. She pulled the other woman after her, into the shelter of a doorway, and just as she was about to drag her into safety, a new chorus of gunfire began, coming from all around, both the direction they’d come from and the direction they’d been going.

  They were in a cross fire, Jo realized.

  She felt Partridge’s body shudder beneath her hand and jerk slightly as she was hit with multiple shots. When she looked down, the young woman had flopped onto her back, her stare turning glassy, blood beginning to bubble from her mouth. Jo cursed, spotted muzzle flashes across the way, back in the direction she’d just come. She leaned out, laying down fire, in time to watch both Steinberg and Rogers go down, hit with bullets fired both in front of and behind them. Rogers flopped face first, and Steinberg tried to struggle on, and then there was another single shot, and his head turned to vapor.

  Jo balked, knowing it was all simulated, appalled by it just the same.

  Then door behind her opened and she was shot seven times in the back.

  “Nice job,” Steinberg told her when she emerged from the combat simulation room. He’d been waiting in the hall, watching her progress on one of the monitors built into the wall, and he turned from it to face her, waited until she was in front of him, before saying it again. “Really, nicely done. I’ve never seen anyone kill off their whole squad in such record time.”

  “Bite me.”

  “You got the squad killed.”

  “The hell I did,” Jo spat. “You were leading us into an ambush, we were all dead anyway.”

  “That’s your excuse? We were going to die anyway, so it doesn’t matter that it happened sooner rather than later?”

  “It’s an unfair scenario, it was designed to end in disaster.”

  “It was designed to see how you worked within a unit,” Steinberg retorted. “It was designed to see if the people around you could rely upon you. It was designed to see if you could follow orders. The moment you disobeyed your squad leader, the simulation read as failure. I told you to follow orders.”

  “Orders would have left Partridge in the middle of the street to have her limbs picked off by a sniper!” Jo shouted at him. “Orders would have had me leave her behind!”

  “Exactly,” Steinberg said.

  “I won’t do that!” Jo shoved him, hard, in the chest, and Steinberg staggered back, keeping his footing and sweeping his forearm up to clear her hands. “I won’t leave people behind to die!”

  “That’s not up to you!” he shouted back, as furious as she was. “Sometimes people die and you have to let them, Joanna!”

  Jo shook her head angrily, shoving him again. “Like hell. Not if I have a say in it!”

  “You don’t get to choose!” Steinberg bellowed.

  Jo faltered, then took a half step back. There was a dull ache in her chest, the feeling of loss and grief still unresolved.

  “You can’t ask me to do that,” she said to Steinberg. “You can’t ask me to do that again, I can’t do that again. I won’t do that again.”

  “You won’t have to, Joanna,” Daniel Carrington said.

  Both she and Steinberg turned, saw him at the foot of the stairs. Jo had no idea how long he’d been there, how much he’d heard. The embarrassment mixed with the other conflicting emotions in her chest, made it hard for her to breathe for a moment. Steinberg seemed as caught as she was, and didn’t move at all for a moment before drawing himself slowly to attention.

  “Sir,” Steinberg said. “The purpose of the simulation …”

  Carrington shook his head slightly, as if to say that whatever excuse or explanation Steinberg wanted to offer was unnecessary, or perhaps irrelevant. He started toward them, using his walking stick to aid his progress.

  “You won’t have to, Joanna, not if I can help it,” Carrington assured her.

  “You can’t guarantee that, Mister Carrington,” Jo said.

  “Not in the long term, perhaps, but for the short term, I think I can.”

  “Really? And how will you do that?”

  “By sending you out alone, Joanna.”

  Steinberg said, “Wait a second, we’re not finished—”

  “There’s a job.” Carrington glanced at Steinberg, silencing him, then continued, speaking to Jo. “One you’ll be doing solo. I need you to report immediately to the briefing room.”

  “Yes, sir!” The eagerness with which she said it surprised her.

  “Armorer’s waiting for you. Head on up, please. I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

  Jo nodded, hurried past Carrington for the stairs. She took them two at a time, up to the second floor, turned along the open balcony to make for the briefing room.

  From below, she could heard the rise of Steinberg’s voice, embroiled in a new argument.

  One he was going to lose, Jo knew.

  CHAPTER 22

  Residence of Paul Sexton—#3 Fairlake Lane, Grosse Pointe, Michigan October 10th, 2020

  The windows of the study looked out over Lake St. Clair, the water shimmering in the clear afternoon sunlight, and Hayes could see across the water to Canada, to the east. The room was large, almost too large, and done in a minimalist style, with furniture of black leather and silver metal and glass. In the center of the floor was a th-scale model of a prototype R-CBowman null-grav armored personnel carrier, a bulbous and modular-looking vehicle. A stand stood beside it, listing the vehicle specifications and the names of the engineers who had been part of its design. Apparently, it was being marketed as the MK I “Dragonfly”—an “insurgence pacification platform” with “low-altitude rapid-insertion capacity�
� and “global deployment ability.”

  Hayes walked around the model, wondering if it was as fragile as it looked. His father, standing nearby, caught his eye and shook his head.

  “Don’t touch it, Laurent.”

  The door into the room opened and Hayes straightened, moving back to his father’s side. Paul Sexton entered, smiling broadly, the picture of the modern “casual CEO” in tan slacks and a white polo shirt. He made a beeline for Doctor Murray, extending his right hand and moving so quickly that Hayes felt himself tensing, suspecting an attack, even though he was certain it was only his father’s hand that Sexton was after.

  “Fred, sorry to keep you waiting,” Sexton said, giving Doctor Murray a very American shaking of the hand.

  “No problem at all, Paul,” Doctor Murray said. “It was short notice, I hope it’s not an inconvenience.”

  “Let’s say my curiosity outweighs my annoyance.” Sexton held Murray’s hand for a moment longer, and Hayes could see his father trying to hide the discomfort he was feeling behind a forced smile. A stab of anger at Sexton thrust through Hayes’s breast, and he wanted to tell him to let go already, to leave his father alone, that his father didn’t like to be touched.

  Then Sexton released Doctor Murray’s hand and turned his very white teeth in his very practiced smile on Hayes. “Paul Sexton, I don’t think we were introduced at the Luxe Life.”

  “This is my son, Laurent,” Doctor Murray said.

  Sexton extended his hand, and Hayes hesitated, and again his father caught his eyes. Hayes took the grip, endured the energetic pump and squeeze that followed it.

  “Nice to meet you, sir,” Hayes said.

  “Pleasure.” Sexton dropped his hand, pointed to the prototype model. “Something else, isn’t it? Real beauty.”

  “This is the government model?” Doctor Murray asked politely.

  “That’s the plan for it, though right now we literally can’t get the damn thing off the ground. The null-G generators crap out at two-point-four metric tons, and no matter what we do, we can’t get them to lift more. And of course we can’t make the damn thing any lighter, because it’s supposed to be an armored weapons platform as well as a troop carrier, and it wouldn’t be much of one of those if any nutcase with a rifle and a cause could punch a hole through the hull.”