Fantasy in Death - J. D. Robb [42]
“That had to hurt—the first gash. It had to hurt as well as shock. What does someone usually do when something hurts, when they’ve been cut, when they’re bleeding? Why didn’t you, Bart?” she asked aloud. “Why didn’t you press your hand to the wound? No blood on your palm, and there would’ve been. It cut, it burned, it bled, but you don’t attempt to staunch it, feel it. It’s instinctive. But you couldn’t if you had something in your hand, like the hilt of a sword. Couldn’t if you tried to defend, or if the killing blow came too fast.”
She ran it again, changing variables, then dragged a hand through her hair. “What was the game? Why would you play with a fake sword if your opponent had a real one?
“Because you didn’t know. But you damn well should have.”
She rose, paced, then gave in and rapped a fist smartly on the closed door.
It took a moment. Did he do that on purpose? Make her wait? Then the light flipped green, and the door opened.
“I need to use the holo-room,” she said. “I need a game that approximates what Bart might have been into at the time of the murder. I need you to set it up and go through it with me.”
“All right. I’ll meet you there.”
“I don’t suppose you have a couple of swords, of the nonlethal variety.”
“Everything in the weapons room is authentic, so no. You’ll have to make do with holo-weapons.”
“Okay.” She tried to think of something else, then simply shrugged and started to the holo-room.
Roarke’s was bigger than the one in Bart’s apartment—big surprise, she thought sourly. It probably met or exceeded the specs of anything Roarke had in any of his R&D operations.
But the size didn’t matter.
A holo-reconstruct of a murder that took place during a holo-game would give her a better feel, she hoped, for what had happened. What often led to why and why to who.
She walked around the large, empty space, listening to her own footsteps echo. She wasn’t much for games, not really. Training exercises, now, that was different, and she found the holo-room handy there.
More than once Roarke had used it to take her somewhere fantastic—a rainy night in Paris, a drifting boat on an empty sea. Romantic, seductive—well, the holo was handy there, too, though at the moment she doubted either of them felt particularly romantic.
He came in with a disc. “You’re still wearing your weapon.”
She’d forgotten, and now stripped off the harness to lay it and the weapon by the door.
“You wanted something close to U-Play’s Fantastical. We’ve been dissecting what we have of it in EDD, but I don’t have the data or components here. It seemed ... a gray area to bring any of that home to continue the work here.”
“Agreed.”
“But I have our most current version of our game—no title as titles can leak. It’s Program HC84-K.”
“You have that at home? Isn’t that shaky security?”
“First, someone would have to know it’s here, then get through house security, into my private office, and find the vault, get through that security, then get through the passcodes and fail-safes on the disc. If they managed all that, they’re likely good enough to have developed this themselves.”
He slid it into a slot as he spoke, used both palm plate and retinal scan, added a voice command and several manual ones.
“In any case,” he continued, “it’s something I’ve been fine-tuning myself, and I prefer to do that here. So ...”
He stepped back, studied her. “You want sword play, but you don’t know the era, the setting, the mode, or the goal. We haven’t managed to get anything off the disc Bart used to give you any of that. You’ll have to pick.”
“I don’t know. Sword fight. Not foils,” she added. “Broad blade. Strong, straight.”
“Broadsword.” He tilted his head, smiled a little.
“Don’t put me in some dumbass girl costume.” She jabbed a finger at him. “I mean it. I’m not doing this half naked for your perverted