The mission had begun just fine. Joanna Dark had completed a treacherous climb up the steep Alaskan mountain unharmed and undetected. She had equipped her Crossbow quickly and quietly and set her DrugSpy in a pouch on her belt where she could easily access it.
Taking a deep breath, she hurled around the corner and shot the guard, catching his body and easing him down to the ground. She took his Dragon and tucked it into her jacket. She did the same to the two guards ahead, one of whom was patrolling, the other dangerously close to the external base alarm. After subduing them, she ran through a cave to the docking of the cable car, and spotted the stewardess.
The young woman, whose pretty face and brown hair would certainly win over the president were she to get on the plane, which would never happen at Joanna's hands, screamed.
"Look out! It's an intruder!"
Joanna froze for a brief second; while her finger tightened on her Crossbow's trigger, she did not shoot. The stewardess took notice of the three soldiers Jo had knocked out.
"Is he okay?" she asked.
Jo smirked. "He'll be just fine."
The stewardess did not allow herself to tremble for more than a second, when a feeling she could not identify as only bravery or impulse surfaced within her. As much as she was terrified, she was determined not to die without helping someone, as she always did.
"I'll go get some help!" she squealed, beginning a rather pathetic jog toward the base entrance. She quickly found her escape blocked by the intruder, and she stepped back.
"No you won't," Joanna said. "You're really starting to annoy me, you know, so for your life and the life of the President, hand over your bag."
The stewardess clutched her bag to her chest in a foolish act of defiance.
"Wrong move," said Jo, who quickly injected the woman with a bolt. Dragging the bodies into a corner, she changed as fast as she could into the disguise from the bag. She took note of the nametag on the uniform, "MARTHA".
Jo slid across the cave wall and spotted the stewardess' two escorts, clad in white uniforms. She knew that they were innocent of any involvement in whatever Trent's plan was and so she was prohibited from killing them, though they were sure to attempt to kill her.
"Where did you get that?" asked one of them in a playful voice. Jo didn't like it when strange men tried to pick her up, so she gave a sweet smile and dropped them both before their jaws could drop.
With that, Jo quickly turned on her heel and sped towards the doors. She smiled at the desk clerk, who did not do the same to her. Instead, she screamed.
"Oh my god!" she cried, diving under her desk. Jo saw that two of the bodies were directly outside the door, and even worse, she had not concealed her Crossbow.
The guards promptly activated a blaring and screeching alarm that Jo believed Foster could even hear back at the firing range. Several more guards began to march through the base entrance, unloading magazine after magazine at Jo. Rounds scraped across Jo's spleen, causing her to hunch over.
As much as her instincts screamed at her to, she did not take out the Dragon in her possession, but backed away and shot her twelve remaining bolts at the men. She dropped all but… how many men? Jo's vision began to blur because of her pain.
That was it for her Crossbow, so Jo dove for cover and took out her DrugSpy, watching it pop needles into the remainder of the guards. Finally, she turned to the quivering desk clerk and drugged her.
The door had locked. Jo tried to activate the door controls from behind the desk herself. The screen flashed the words "ACCESS DENIED".
"Damn it!" she groaned, slamming her fists on the desk surface. Carrington would be cross if she aborted the mission, but at the same time, she was unable to complete it.
Wait…
A thought suddenly occurred to her. "The outer alarm… if I destroy it, there might be more guards within the base that can open the door… it's worth a shot."
She backtracked to the alarm. Several Dragon rounds and a destroyed alarm later, the alarm began to blare again, and sure enough, more of the white-clad guards began to pour out the base entrance, leaving it wide open. Jo rushed past them, beating them with her Dragon (but not shooting with it), which only stunned them.
That's when Jo realized she forgot the suitcase.
She saw two office workers escaping from an elevator, and she chased them, firing at their feet and causing the one carrying the case to trip.
"Give me that and you can leave with your life!" she demanded. The frightened office worker complied, tossing it to her. She quickly stuffed her weapons and the G5 recording into the case before dashing back into the base entrance, the guards firing at her as she went.
Jo tripped on the escalator. She swore and slipped her heels off her feet, then continued on. She quickly dropped the case on the luggage carrier and watched as it started to move along the tracks, before she turned the corner into the main area. Her running was hindered by the bleeding of her spleen, which was lessening. Jo worried about her loss of blood.
Her ankle was no help either. She wasn't sure if she merely hurt it or twisted it. She was glad she didn't become a dancer.
At that moment, she realized Carrington had yet to scold her and demand that she abort the mission whether the President was safe or not. She suspected he hadn't done so because she'd kept to her word and not killed one civilian, but she couldn't be sure.
She then realized that her eyepiece was destroyed when rogue Dragon rounds had narrowly avoided ripping into her left temple, spelling an early end to her quest.
Either way, Jo had done nothing that could get her removed from the Institute, and so whether her boss liked it or not, Joanna resigned herself to saving the President and, if necessary, taking out Trent Easton and his NSA lackeys.
A guard came up to her, seemingly ignorant of the blood on her knuckles and side and her lack of shoes.
"How's things?" he asked. Jo smiled and crept behind him. "Fine," she replied, knocking him down and hijacking his Dragon. She quickly stuffed it into her jacket and found a staircase leading to the security room. There was an NSA agent in the far back of the room, while a white guard tended to the console.
"Hey there," he said to her. Jo smirked and leaned forward in a seductive way as she inputted a key command into the security console. It displayed the message, "SECURITY SYSTEM SHUTTING DOWN".
The NSA at the back kneeled and aimed his Dragon straight at the white guard's sides. Jo quickly pushed him out of the way and nearly took damage to her stomach. Gasping, she ripped out her stolen Dragon and quickly dropped the shooter.
"Oh my god!" screamed the white guard. "Who are you?"
"That's the last thing you should worry about right now. The President's in danger and we need to help him!"
He nodded and followed her sluggishly toward the elevator.
"We're taking over!" screamed a far-off voice as the unmistakable sound of men dying flooded Jo's ears. She gritted her teeth and continued forward, dropping a guard beside the elevator. Jo handed the guard's DY357 Magnum to her companion, who loaded it while she called for the lift.
"Tell me your name at least," the guard said, blasting the brains out of an NSA that appeared out of nowhere.
"Joanna!" Jo cried over the loud sound of gunfire, not their own, killing more innocent soldiers.
"Pretty name for a pretty girl… mine's Winchell."
"Sorry we couldn't meet under better circumstances!"
"It's alright… what's life without a little excitement?" he asked. Jo laughed.
"I used to say that!"
The elevator appeared and they did not hesitate in boarding it. It took about fifteen seconds to descend. Once at the bottom, Jo quickly sniped a guard up ahead, and blasted his companion around the corner. Winchell blew up the security panel on the wall they were guarding, overloading the nearby laser grid field.
"So that's Air Force One?" Jo asked. "Huh, smaller than I thought."
"You'd love the interior," Winchell replied.
Jo nodded. "If only the President's life wasn't at risk."
NSAs began to filter out of another elevator at the back.
"EVERYBODY, GET HER!" they screamed.
"Bet you never thought the stewardess did it," Jo wisecracked, sniping several of them and grimacing as their bodies collapsed while buckets of blood escaped from their brains.
Quickly, she and Winchell were surrounded.
"Get clear!" she told him. "I'll hold them off!"
"You can't be serious, you won't survive!"
"I'm not called Perfect Dark for nothing!" she said, rolling to her good side and blasting another soldier. The last of her Dragon depleted, Jo activated its Proximity Self Destruct feature and launched it at the feet of another quintuplet of men, turning away as she heard their anguished screams.
"That's the last of them for now. Get to the upper floor and grab the flight plans!" Jo told Winchell.
Winchell finally relented, nodding as he sped toward the lift at the back of the room.
"Winchell!" Jo cried out.
He turned. "Yes?"
"If you make it out and I don't, get a message out to an agent at the Carrington Institute!"
"Oh, so that's where you're from!"
She nodded. "Tell Jonathan Steinberg I said, 'Jonathan, I love you, you sick reckless bastard!'"
Winchell snickered and gave her thumbs up. Before he reached the elevator, he turned back one last time and shouted, "It's been an honor to serve, Joanna!"
She smiled and watched him leave.
"Now let's get onboard before I look even more like a torture victim…"
She began to gradually but slowly pull herself up the ladder on the underside of Air Force One when something flew past her.
A bullet.
"Shit!" she cried out as she temporarily lost her balance. She saw a straw NSA straggling straight towards her.
"Nice and steady… nice and steady…" she said, hooking her right arm under one of the ladder rungs and shooting him with her K7 Avenger. However, for the first time in her short career as a mercenary, Joanna Dark did something she had never done.
She missed.
Another string of bullets at the attacker were responded to by an attack to Jo's wrist that again caused her to lose balance on the ladder and fall. The attacker fired again, this time missing as Jo rolled out of the way while clutching her bleeding wrist, but she would feel greater pain in a second.
That was because she rolled into a laser.
It burned her shoulder and back, further crippling her after the bullets in her spleen and the round currently lodged in her veins, which she believed would burst more than one blood vessel.
She tried to crawl away with her good hand, any instincts to turn and fight long evaporated from her consciousness, which was diminishing.
"I can't die here…" she mumbled.
The tip of her attacker's gun dug into her spinal cord.
"Oh, just do it already!" she groaned.
Instead, she was turned over.
"Going to rape me to death?" she inquired.
The attacker did nothing. Minutes turned into hours and hours turned to days, the anticipation in Jo threatening to burst her at the seams. Her skin burned and bled out as she became more and more accepting of death. Her misery would soon be over.
The NSA fired a hole clean between her eyes.
And at last, Joanna Dark finally died.