Perfect Dark: Second Front Read online

  For a moment, Jonathan’s burgeoning anger subsided. Then, Carrington added, “Can she fight?”

  The anger Steinberg had been carrying before flared, irrational, but just as intense, and he needed a moment to assure himself he could keep it from his voice when he answered.

  “She can barely stand, Daniel.”

  Carrington rubbed a hand over his beard and mustache, as if absently reassuring himself that both were still on his face.

  “Pity,” he said, and turned, making his way back to Grimshaw and the other technicians engaged in the Institute’s information defense.

  The alarms had just begun declaring intrusion attempt number seventy-seven as Steinberg left the Operations Center to ready the Institute defenses.

  Home of Former dataDyne CEO

  Zhang Li (Deceased)

  38km SW Li Xian, Sichuan Province

  People’s Republic of China

  January 20th, 2021

  The change was wearing off by the time Chun Fan returned home to the rest of the Continuity, and she was consequently in exquisite agony by then. Her brothers and her sisters helped her to her room, and two stayed with her for the last hour of the reversion, listening to her screams of ecstatic agony as the final vestiges of the Chrysalis leaked from her body.

  Chun Fan knew what a masochist was, but she didn’t think she was a masochist. A masochist only loved pain, after all, and Chun Fan was not so simple. She loved the pain, she could admit it, but at the same time, she hated it. Just as she could, at once, both love and hate the woman she had pretended to be when she put Georg Bricker out of the misery he called his life. So she screamed, thrashing on her bed, flailing her arms and legs even as her limbs, like the rest of her, reverted to what they had been before leaving China. Cell by cell and bone by bone, her body returned to its original form, and instead of looking like Joanna Dark, she once again looked like Chun Fan, eldest of the Continuity, Zhang Li’s chosen children.

  The physical demands of the change were such that Fan spent much of the following day in bed. Ke-Ling, two years younger than Fan’s nineteen, and thus the second-eldest of the family, brought her updates of their progress while she recovered.

  “CMO took Zentek, just as we planned. The intrusion attacks on Carrington’s main campus started two hours and forty-seven minutes after you popped the German, just as the news went public. We’re up to assault number—dig this—114, and I’m sure we’re giving their chief programmer fits, though he also probably thinks the reason we’ve failed is that he’s so damn good. Quon and Zi-Zi both want to go all the way in and just crash their optical now, but I’ve been sitting on them.”

  Fan rolled onto her side in the bed, reached for the cup of tea her brother was offering. It was still too hot to drink comfortably, but she took a gulp anyway, forcing it down, before asking, “What happened to the Bitch?”

  “Velez moved her right away, we’re not sure where. I’m guessing to the ‘secret’ house they just finished in New Zealand, but Tai-Hua thinks maybe they’re in Buenos Aires.”

  “You don’t know? Baby brother, what would our father say?”

  Ke-Ling cracked a broad grin at her, showing his tattooed teeth. “He’d say it is the battle that defines us, and the stakes must be high for the battle to be worth anything at all.”

  “Contact our friend in Paris, use my handle, see if he doesn’t let it slip.”

  “You don’t want to do it yourself? The next packet is ready for upload, I figured you’d want to be the one to send it.”

  “Bring me a deck, then,” Fan said, finishing her tea. “And a rig, I need to practice. Jo-Jo is back at the Institute, yeah?”

  “We’re pretty sure, yeah. She was picked up in Seattle roughly the time you were leaving with the dead man. She’s going to be hard to track once she finds out.”

  “Well, that’s fine, because we don’t need to track her.” Fan returned her brother’s smile with one of her own. “She’ll come here. She already knows the way.”

  Ke-Ling nodded, leaned down, and kissed Fan gently on the lips. “There’s one more thing.”

  “Hmm?”

  “The CMO woman, she’ll be here in the morning with the payment.”

  “Just make sure I’m up.”

  He put a hand to his heart, as if wounded by the thought of any dereliction of duty. “But of course. I’ll get you that deck.”

  “And a DeathMatch rig, Ke-Ke. I need to practice.”

  “You don’t need to practice. You’re better than Zhang Mai ever was.”

  “So was Joanna Dark,” Fan said. “And she’s the one I’m going to have to beat.”

  Fan stayed in bed, handling the upload to Paris, then switching to the DeathMatch rig and booting up her favorite combat simulation, loading the arena with as many virtual Mai Hems as the program would allow. She armed them all to the teeth, then gave herself a combat knife. She switched the feedback safeties off, so she could feel the sting every time she was hit. Then she proceeded to murder Zhang Li’s dead daughter eighty-four times in succession before finally succumbing to a rocket attack and being virtually splattered all over the virtual interior of the Sistine Chapel.

  She did a second game immediately thereafter, this time loading the custom bot she’d programmed with her brothers and sisters, the one of Joanna Dark. She gave them each identical load-outs and used the baseline arena setting for their battle. Again, she kept the feedback safeties off.

  The Joanna bot was a good one, loaded with all the moves recorded off her during her actual battle with Mai Hem here, in the mansion. There were tweaks, too, information culled from other sources; there’d been a treasure trove of information in the pharmaDyne security servers, showing her in a rooftop fight with some junkie who’d also had some good moves, but no artistry. That was one of the things Fan loved about fighting Joanna Dark; she was pure art. Watching her fight was like reading poetry, like listening to opera, like watching Shakespeare. Fan adored it, adored her, the woman who had killed Zhang Mai not once, but twice, even if it was only the second one that really counted.

  How could Fan not have loved her for that? For killing her rival, for killing the arrogant, preening, self-centered bitch who had put herself between Fan and her father, Zhang Li. Of course Chun Fan loved Joanna Dark. She had to.

  Just the way she had to hate Joanna with a murderous strength as powerful as her love. Because, while Joanna Dark had killed Mai Hem, she had also killed Zhang Li. And when someone murders your father, well, you’re supposed to hate them.

  Fan felt supremely confident that Joanna Dark would understand that.

  It was a good battle between Fan and Joanna, lasting almost two and a half minutes this time, longer than normal. Jo clipped her with a blast from a SuperDragon early on and managed to score two hits to Fan’s chest with a MagSec, but Fan’s body armor held, and she was on Joanna then, and they went hand-to-hand. Joanna was strong, too, and had more reach than Fan, but she didn’t have the weight, and finally Fan was able to flip Joanna into one of the support pillars, smashing her forehead against the sharp edge. There was a gratifying crack of bone, and it was enough to send Jo reeling for a second. Fan pivoted low, taking the other woman’s knees out from behind, and when Jo went down, Fan was ready, and grabbed a handful of that beautiful, wonderful, silky red hair.

  Then Fan proceeded to bash Joanna Dark’s face into the ground over and over again, reducing her pretty features to soup.

  The woman from CMO was named Portia de Carcareas, and she was exactly the type of woman Chun Fan detested, because she was all image and no soul, no substance. Like all of the women from CMO, Chun Fan was certain. The ones who always reminded her of Zhang Mai and the way she would slut around the mansion wearing a dress that seemed made of equal parts masking tape and Mylar. The high-and-mighty Mai Hem had thought it made her sexy, had made her irresistible, but Fan knew the truth; it made her look tawdry and cheap, and everyone who ever saw her in it just thought she was a who
re, bringing dishonor to their father’s name. The fact that Zhang Mai lasted as long as she had as their father’s “only daughter” was due to her proficiency in DeathMatch VR and her subsequent popularity with fans of the “sport”—nothing else.

  At least Portia de Carcareas had the courtesy and sense to not dress like a whore, even if, in the final analysis, that’s what she was. Likewise the drivers of the three null-g Overlanders that came with her, all women as well, ferrying the Continuity’s payment for services rendered.

  That was CMO’s thing, Fan knew. The public face of the company was that of Shane Eddy, ruggedly handsome, quick-witted, and given to extravagant media stunts. Most recently, he had issued an open invitation to all the other hypercorp CEOs to join him in a snowmobile race from one edge of Antarctica to the other, the stakes being, of course, controlling interests in each of their companies. All had declined, leaving Eddy to race alone; the last Fan had heard, he was approaching Amundsen-Scott-GloboProComm Wireless at the South Pole.

  But Shane Eddy didn’t run Core-Mantis OmniGlobal, and Chun Fan and her brothers and sisters in the Continuity were perhaps the only people outside of the CMO upper echelon who had discovered that fact. Eddy was a show pony, a figurehead, and the hypercorporation was run, instead, by a close-knit clique of women who called themselves—in internal communications only—Harmonia’s Daughters.

  “The who?” Fan had asked upon being informed of the discovery.

  Her youngest sister, Shuang, explained. “It means they think of themselves as Amazons, you know, the warrior women.”

  “The ones who cut off their….”

  Shuang giggled. “Yeah. They were supposed to be all savage and sexy and the Greek men were scared of them so much they would pee themselves rather than fight them.”

  “So why don’t they just call themselves Amazons?”

  “Well, the Amazons were supposed to be the children of the god of war, Ares, and this super sexy water nymph named Harmonia. So maybe they thought it sounded better?”

  “How do you know all of this?” Fan had asked.

  Shuang had shrugged, the movement almost entirely hidden beneath the folds of the red and gold silk dress she liked to wear. The dress was far too big for her, tailored to a woman twice her age. Shuang was only twelve, but she tried to convince all her other siblings she was actually fourteen, as if it made a difference.

  That was Core-Mantis OmniGlobal, third largest hypercorporation in the world, and, if things went according to Fan’s plans, soon to become second largest. A company run by women who wished they were Amazons. It didn’t mean that men weren’t employed by CMO, but it meant that ultimately, men held no real power in the corporation. If something was important to CMO, it was handled by a woman.

  It pleased Fan that Carcareas had brought other women with her, because she knew it meant Core-Mantis was taking their transaction seriously. It meant that they valued everything the Continuity could offer them. All the more important because of what Chun Fan intended to offer them next.

  Fan greeted the convoy of vehicles in the outer courtyard, with Ke-Ling accompanying her. There’d been snowfall recently, and it clung to the trees and the buildings, to the ancient stone sculptures, some of them from as far back as the Chin dynasty. The air was crisp, and the noise of the approaching Overlanders carried through it, echoing off the mountainsides around them. Cold, but not so cold that the water in the reflecting ponds and the little streams that criss-crossed the outer garden had frozen over.

  Before their father had died, simply getting this far into the mountains and beyond the first wall would have meant running a gauntlet of security and guards, everything from snipers to antipersonnel mines and laser grids. These days there were no guards, because Fan and her brothers and sisters didn’t need them. Just the networked security system with their personalized tweaks. If they needed to kill someone, it would be done with the press of a keyboard, not the pull of a trigger.

  The lead Overlander came into view, followed by three others, all of them painted black, with the CMO logo laser-etched on their hoods. The first vehicle passed through the gate, then pulled over when its driver saw Fan and Ke-Ling standing there, waiting, and as it came to a gentle landing on the ground, the remaining cars in the convoy pulled to a stop in a line, their null-g engines idling.

  From the corner of her eye, Fan could see the distortion fields beneath each of the waiting vehicles, the warping of space that always made her feel a little dizzy, a little nauseated. She avoided looking at them directly, instead focusing on Carcareas, who was now exiting the lead vehicle.

  “Signora Carcareas.” Fan bowed.

  “Lady Chun,” Carcareas said, returning it. She’d come dressed for the weather, winter in the mountains of Sichuan, boots and a skin-tight black thermal suit that hugged each and every one of her elegant curves. A fur-lined coat, tailored well enough that it accentuated her shape rather than hid it, capped the ensemble. No weapons visible, but that meant nothing, and, in truth, Fan didn’t really care. Carcareas wouldn’t raise a finger against her, or her brother, or any of her family, she knew; not unless one of the Continuity did so first.

  Carcareas was taller than them both by only a few inches, and certainly older, but Fan wasn’t certain by how much; CMO specialized in body-modification more than any other hypercorporation, everything from performance-enhancing implants to drug therapies and cosmetic alterations. She could have been sixty rather than thirty, there was no way to tell. Whatever her age, she was beautiful, with olive skin and thick black hair, and pouting lips that promised sensuality and passion.

  “Allow me to introduce you to my brother, Ke-Ling.”

  “A pleasure.” Carcareas indicated the waiting Overlanders. “I have your payment, exactly as you insisted.”

  “All of it?”

  “Seventy-two million, two hundred and ninety-four thousand, six hundred and two dollars. In cash.”

  At her side, Fan heard her brother chuckle softly, and she had to struggle to keep her expression serious. It was a ludicrous figure, for several reasons aside from the ridiculousness of the actual number. The truth was, Fan had come up with it literally from thin air. After all, who knew what the actual market price was for killing not just the CEO of a hypercorp, but the hypercorp itself? As far as that went, Fan was certain she had given Core-Mantis OmniGlobal one hell of a bargain.

  “Very good,” Fan said. “If you would like to direct the drivers to the inner courtyard, we can unload it there.”

  Carcareas nodded slightly, then dipped her chin and spoke inaudibly to her ThroatLink. After a moment, she raised her head again, smiling once more. “Shall I follow you?”

  “This way.” Fan turned, waiting for Carcareas to come alongside her, then began walking along one of the many paths that would lead, eventually, to the inner courtyard. “We trust you were pleased with our results?”

  “Very much so,” Carcareas said. “Everything occurred exactly as you said it would, and the information you provided was entirely accurate. We were able to access the Zentek servers in Berlin exactly as you directed. It was as if their security simply ceased to exist. The directors are very impressed.”

  “We are pleased.”

  There was a moment of silence as the three walked together, cresting one of the paths high enough that they now had a view over the inner wall, to the inner courtyard. The Overlanders were coming to a stop near the massive fire pit at the center of the garden. Smoke and waves of heat rose from the flames, and as they looked down, Fan could see almost a dozen of her siblings emerge from the mansion, moving to greet the vehicles.

  “Have them open the cases once they’re unloaded, please.”

  Carcareas murmured to her ThroatLink, and while they watched, the drivers of each of the Overlanders exited, began removing case after case after case of the currency. Each was opened as it was set on the ground, and Fan watched as another of her brothers, Wei, moved from one to the next, checking their c
ontents.

  “It’s all there, I promise you,” Carcareas said. “We wouldn’t wish to jeopardize our relationship with the Continuity.”

  “It has served us well, hasn’t it?”

  “It has. To such an extent that I have been instructed to inquire about another … arrangement.”

  Fan again had to hide a smile, feigning curiosity. “Oh?”

  “Beck-Yama’s attempt to acquire Zentek has left them momentarily cash poor. They are overextended and vulnerable—”

  Fan raised her right hand, holding up two fingers, and Carcareas fell silent.

  “Ke-Ke, please give Signora Carcareas your d-PAL.”

  Ke-Ling stepped forward, offering the slender, credit-card-sized PDA to Carcareas.

  “What is this?” Carcareas asked Fan.

  “Beck-Yama International.”

  The other woman’s eyes widened momentarily, and then she recovered from her surprise and took the d-PAL from Ke-Ling’s hand. Fan waited while she activated the PDA, began quickly scanning the terabyte upon terabyte worth of files that Ke-Ling had prepared, alternately projecting and scrolling data.

  “Most of this is encoded,” Carcareas said after nearly a minute. “You’ve encrypted it.”

  “Did CMO do your eyes, as well, Signora?” Fan asked mildly. “The ThroatLink is a surgical procedure, of course, and I am assuming you’ve had the pheromone secretion therapy. Did they do your eyes, too?”

  Carcareas stiffened, glaring at Fan, and Fan met the look with the mildness she had put in her questions now on her face. Carcareas relaxed, flicking off the d-PAL and handing it back to Ke-Ling.

  “Two augments,” Carcareas admitted. “Series Four: the Spectrum, and the Memory set.”

  “So you see why we might wish to encrypt the data when your eyes can literally record everything you see. It would have been poor business on our part to do otherwise.”

  “So what did I not see?”

  “Everything you needed to successfully bring Beck-Yama to its knees. Back-door access to its quantum optical systems, location of their datacore itself. All the financials. Passwords. Work-arounds. Troop deployments.”