Deus Ex: Black Light

by James Swallow

  “You don’t know a damn thing,” the smoker was telling his compatriot, waving the cigarette in the air between the fingers of a gold-plated cyberarm. “That ain’t how it happened. Folks didn’t go crazy because of no germs, fool. The incident was all down to the gov’ment!”

  The other ganger bounced on the balls of his feet, the pistons in his augmetic legs hissing with each motion. “What makes you the one who knows?” His speech was slightly slurred, and Jensen recognized the effects of a zee dose. The artificial neurochemical was a potent street drug that was popular among Detroit’s criminal underclass. The other MCB snapped his mouth open and shut. “Millions of people wind up dead? That ain’t just the government, man. Too big for that.” He shook his head vigorously. “Those coghatin’, natch-lovin’ Purity First assholes did it! Them and that Humanity Front, pretending they’s all decent and shit, but they was in it together, they made a killer virus! Sent everybody loco, is what it did.” He flexed his arms. “Heard it from a guy who used to work at LIMB, man. That’s stone cold truth.”

  Jensen crept closer, moving to keep himself out of their fields of view. He was almost in range.

  The smoker cleared his throat and spat into the weeds sprouting through the damaged tarmac at his feet. “Nope. Let me tell you what’s real. The Man, he want to keep us down ’cos of this!” He curled his metal-clad fingers into a defiant fist. “The Man kisses up to those corporate sons-of-bitches and they mess with the pozy! That’s how they did it, yeah? Con-tam-in-ate-ed.” He sounded out the word for extra emphasis. “They knew it was a bad batch, but they still wanted their paper. And now they get to come down hard on all us cogs, pretend like it was our fault!” He spat again. “Hey! You listening to me?”

  The other ganger was looking away, staring into nothing. “Reckon I saw something moving, is all.”

  “You crazy,” snorted the smoker, taking another long drag.

  “He’s really not,” said Jensen, decloaking between the pair of them. Both the MCBs reacted with shouts of alarm and went fumbling for their guns, but neither of them were fast enough to avoid Jensen’s reflex-boosted attack as he struck out and grabbed them by their necks. With a single, lighting-fast move, he yanked them off-balance and cracked their skulls against one another with enough force to knock them both unconscious. He released his grip and let them slump into a heap among the overgrowth.

  Stacks burst out of cover and sprinted to his side. “That is some neat trick,” he said. “I know you said back at 451 that you was some kinda cop, but level with me. Is that all you is?”

  “I’m someone trying to do right,” he told him. “That’s what matters.” Jensen gathered up the machine pistols and ammo clips from the two fallen gangers and Stacks followed him to the sealed doorway.

  * * *

  The expandable metal barrier blocking the entrance had a magnetic lock holding it closed, and Jensen took a second to consider how he was going to deal with it.

  Stacks shook his head and pushed him aside. “Allow me.” The ex-steeplejack reached down, and with a spin of his wrist, he wrenched the lock mechanism out of the frame. “Easy…”

  Despite Stacks’s wary grin, Jensen still saw the tremors in his artificial hand. “I need you focused,” he told him. “Okay?”

  “No… no problem,” Stacks breathed. “I’m just a little new to this breaking and entering stuff, is all.”

  “Stay close and watch my back.” He handed the other man one of the machine pistols. Stacks took it like it was poisonous. “Don’t use it unless you have to.”

  “You can… count on that.”

  Jensen put his shoulder to the barrier and forced it open. Passing through, they emerged on a raised platform above a sunken loading bay. It ran the full length of the building, vanishing into darkness and shadows. But a few hundred meters away, there was a knot of activity illuminated by the lights Stacks had seen from the rooftops.

  “Tread careful,” Jensen whispered, and then set off in a crouched walk, panning his gaze from side to side. The smart vision implant in his skull parsed the environment around him, projecting a sensor grid overlay on to his optical display, highlighting movement and potential targets. There were a lot of gangers down there, some of them milling around with weapons at the ready, others working in a ragged line as they carried plastic containers out from deeper in the warehouse annex.

  Jensen halted in the lee of a support pillar and watched as two men hefted a long box into the back of a six-wheeler cargo truck. The familiar stylized seraph’s wing logo of Sarif Industries was visible on the side of the crate.

  “Ishtar-model leg augmentations,” said Pritchard; for a moment, Jensen had forgotten that the hacker was seeing more or less exactly what he did. “At least, that’s what the barcode on the box says. In reality, it could be anything in there.”

  “That’s not mech limbs,” said Jensen, as he caught sight of another MCB ganger approaching, pushing a wheeled barrow with an open crate atop it. He saw the recognizable honeycomb pattern of Typhoon modules inside, wrapped in plastic packing sheets. Distributed around the torso and limbs of an implantee, they could project a series of directed-blast explosive spheres, effectively turning the user into a human cluster bomb.

  Another ganger stepped in the way and Jensen saw a face he knew – the one called Cali, who had tried to shake down Pritchard for protection. “There’s your buddy with the attitude problem,” he said quietly, watching as a bull-necked man wearing a reversed baseball cap came striding over to interrupt Cali’s conversation.

  “This guy looks like… like he’s in charge,” muttered Stacks from nearby.

  Jensen nodded in agreement. The new arrival had implanted eye shields, gold mirrors that were thick and round like antique coins. He sneered as he spoke harshly to Cali, revealing more gold worked into his teeth. One arm was artificial, plated with a fake skin-tone sheath and lines of white chaser lights beneath the polymer epidermis. The rest of the MCBs gave him a respectful berth as he jabbed a finger at the air. In his other hand he was holding a digital tablet.

  “Magnet,” said Pritchard. “The top dog of the Motor City Bangers, in the very unpleasant flesh.”

  As he watched, Jensen saw Magnet aim a kick at the wheels of the barrow and he caught a snatch of swearing as the gang leader berated the younger member. The MCB pushing the barrow left it behind and sprinted back off into the storage racks, while Magnet turned his attention fully on Cali. He pointed at some of the crates and shook his head, instead jabbing his finger at others that hadn’t yet been loaded.

  “He’s got himself a shopping list,” Jensen thought aloud.

  “That’s not all,” added Pritchard. “I’m reading another encrypted signal in your area, tagged on an infolink channel. Someone is speaking to Magnet directly through a mastoid com implant, just as I’m talking to you.”

  That confirmed the suspicion that had been forming in Jensen’s thoughts since the start. While the MCBs clearly had ambition beyond their station as just a street gang, it didn’t track that a group like them would be players in the theft and sale of prohibited human augmentation technology. “Whoever is on the other end of that infolink conversation is the one holding Magnet’s leash,” he said. “Pritchard, can you back-trace the signal, find out where it’s coming from?”

  The hacker’s reply was predictably terse. “What do you think I’m doing?”

  “Hey,” whispered Stacks. “A lot of trouble waitin’ to happen down there, Jensen.” His tone began to rise, taking on a fearful edge. “You mind telling me how we’re gonna puh-put all this hardware outta action, without getting lead-lined? Huh?”

  “Keep it together,” Jensen said firmly. “There’s a way. But it’s a little showier than what I’d hoped for…” He paused, scanning the warehouse. The scavenger had been right, there was an army of them down there. Far too many for two men to take on directly. “Pritchard, check the blueprints. I need you to find me an access shaft down to the sub-basement
. The main utilities conduit.”

  “Working on it…” A moment later, an icon blinked into existence on Jensen’s retinal display. “Waypoint uploaded. That’ll take you to it.” He paused. “I see what’s down there, so I think I know what you’re planning. And it’s idiotic.”

  “Didn’t ask your opinion,” he retorted.

  “What?” Stacks shot him a nervous look.

  “Follow me,” Jensen told the other man. “I’m gonna need that muscle of yours.”

  * * *

  In the end, it took both of them to force open the doors to the service shaft that dropped down into the darkness. Jensen pushed through the gap and found a ladder that allowed him to descend quickly and quietly. Stacks followed, grimly moving down one rung at a time, hand over hand.

  There was little light, but his smart vision mode got past that problem, the Eye-Know optics rendering the area in a grid of geometric shapes that he could navigate easily. He glanced over his shoulder. “Still with me?”

  “I gotta choice?” grumbled Stacks. He followed as Jensen moved on, but he was flinching at every echo of noise from above them, every knock and thud of the pipes that lined the sub-basement floor.

  Jensen quickly found what he was looking for. Set into the pipes were a series of smaller branching conduits and a regulator mechanism studded with valves. He tested one experimentally. The wheel atop the valve moved a fraction and then stuck.

  “I need you to throw this open,” he told Stacks. “All the way. Can you do that?”

  The other man peered through the dimness at the regulator, seeing the warning plate bolted to the pipe that specifically said not to do what Jensen was asking. “Are you c-crazy? This here’s a gas main. If there’s anything still flowing through it—”

  “There is.” Jensen cut him off, tapping on an old-style gauge that had a needle gently twitching in the lower ranges of its dial. “Not full on, but enough.”

  “Oh, man.” Stacks raised his hands to his face, clasping it between his spindly augmented fingers. “You wanna cause a leak, blow this place to hell? How you gonna do that?”

  Jensen reached into a pocket on his tactical vest and produced a flexible rectangular pack filled with a blue gel. “This is a remote-detonated explosive. We plant it, get the hell out and then…” He spread his hands.

  “That’ll bring the whole building down on the heads of those idiots upstairs.”

  Jensen nodded. “That’s the idea.”

  Stacks’s hands were trembling, so he knotted them together. “And you’re okay with that?”

  Jensen’s jaw hardened. “You want to go up there and ask them real nice to put those augs back where they found them?” He frowned. “If you’ve got another way to stop them walking out of here with that tech, let’s hear it.”

  “I… I guess not.” Stacks gave a doleful nod. “All right then. Step back, let me do it.” Clasping the valve wheel, he gave a deep grunt and turned it. Stacks’s aug arms juddered as he applied more force to the action, and then suddenly the valve failed catastrophically. The wheel snapped off in his hands, taking part of the mechanism with it.

  Jensen immediately caught the stink of gas from the fractured pipe, and he tossed the explosive pack down next to it. “Okay, we gotta book, now!”

  But they were only a few steps away from the maintenance shaft when voices echoed down to them from the upper floor. Jensen pushed Stacks back to the wall as a flashlight beam stabbed downward, followed by a gob of thick spittle as someone spat down into the gloom and laughed.

  “Pritchard, our way out is compromised,” whispered Jensen. “Need an alternative, now.”

  “Hey, whatssat down there?” called a voice from above.

  As he pulled Stacks away, Pritchard’s voice sounded through Jensen’s bone-induction transceiver. “According to the building plans, five meters to your right is a crawlway that should take you up to an access channel underneath one of the materials recycling bays.”

  “Copy that.” The acrid taste of the gas was gathering at the back of his throat. “Stacks, this way.”

  “I hope you… know what you’re doing, man.” Stacks coughed and fell in step with him.

  * * *

  Later, Jensen would reflect on the thought that here was where everything started to fall apart.

  Yanking open the vent concealing the other shaft, he didn’t waste any time climbing up and through. As Jensen ascended back toward ground level, he felt the crawlway shake and creak as Stacks forced his way up behind him. It was a tight fit for both of them, and the other man’s thick cyberlimbs scraped along the inside of the metal walls. He thought he heard Stacks muttering under his breath, like he was talking to someone only he could hear. Pritchard’s warning about stability echoed in Jensen’s thoughts.

  His shoulder made contact with a gridded metal plate and he forced it up and open, rising with a gasp as he emerged in the gloom of the recycling bay. Jensen gave an involuntary shudder as his lungs filled with cold air. The chamber had a damp, refrigerated chill, and he could hear fluid dripping on to a tiled floor. In the dim light that crept in around double doors at either end of the room, Jensen made out strange rectangular shapes hanging from suspended rails. He brushed one with his hand; it was flexible plastic, with something bulky but supple contained within.

  Behind him, Stacks came climbing out of the crawlway, shivering and nervous. “I… I gotta get out of here.”

  “No argument there.” Jensen took two steps and heard the dull buzz of a motion sensor as it brought the room’s lighting out of rest mode and up to full brightness. With a sudden shock of bright white, the whole of the recycling bay was revealed around them.

  Jensen’s first sense was of a meat locker. Hundreds of meter-long packets dangled all around them, and in each one was a human limb, bathed in an inert liquid sealant. Not organic limbs, of course. The riot of skin colors – from normal human shades to ink-dark and metallic emerald, from candy-apple crimson to zebra stripes – belied their origins. Each packet was marked with a red stamp bearing the Sarif Industries logo, showing that the cybernetics had failed at some critical juncture of testing and been sent down here with intent to be dismantled and recycled.

  In that brief moment, Jensen turned back to see the expression on Stacks’s face and he could only imagine the lens of horror through which the other man saw the room.

  “Wait!” Jensen reached out for him, desperately trying to forestall any fear-fueled reaction Stacks would have. But he was already too late. It was the moment in the lab all over again, but this time the animal terror in the other’s man’s eyes would not abate so easily.

  Stacks cried out in utter shock, swinging his massive machine-arms around, recoiling from the severed limbs hanging all around him. Panicking, he raked and clawed at the grotesque orchard of synthetic legs and arms, his boots splashing across puddles of the milky preservative liquid where it had congealed like watery resin. He began screaming, and the sound rebounded off the tiled walls. It was the bellowing of a man pushed beyond dread into the worst fear he could imagine.

  “Why did you bring me here?” he screamed. “Why are you showing me this?”

  “I didn’t know!” Jensen went for him, reaching out in a vain attempt to grab the ex-steeplejack, but his heavy rust-red metal limbs knocked him aside, the glancing blow blasting the wind out of his lungs. Each mad sweep of Stacks’s grinding, piston-hissing arms tore down dozens of packets, the useless augs tumbling to the floor and cracking apart.

  “What did you do to me?” Stacks bellowed. “Why did you make me do this? Who are you? Who are you?” He shrieked the words, eyes wide but with no recognition in them. Jensen realized too late that Pritchard had been right; whatever had triggered in Stacks at the Sarif lab had not just been due to his neuropozyne withdrawal. It went far deeper than that. The man was damaged inside, tormented by personal demons that went way beyond anything else.

  “Stop!” Jensen shouted back at him, desperate to
snap him out of his mania. “Stacks, this isn’t what you think!”

  “I couldn’t stop myself! I couldn’t stop couldn’t stop stop stop STOP…” Stacks’s cries became thunderous and his metallic fingers raked across his face, drawing runnels of blood as they gouged his cheeks.

  Jensen tried again to grab him, and this time a thick steel elbow joint cracked him squarely in the sternum. The impact rattled his teeth in his head and Jensen tasted blood as he stumbled back, barely keeping his footing.

  Then there were shouts from the corridor beyond the chamber, and the heavy doors crashed open as three MCB gangers burst in, each one brandishing a weapon.

  Stacks wheeled around and howled, spittle foaming on his lips, his claw-hands snapping at nothing.

  The gang members did not hesitate. Their guns barked and Jensen instinctively threw himself to the ground as a salvo of shotgun blasts and 10mm rounds ripped through the air, carving into the other man. Stacks lurched forward, blood jetting from his wounds, and crushed the head of the nearest MCB between the fingers of one mechanical hand. Another he sent careening into a wall with a vicious backhand blow, before the pain signals from his body finally reached his brain and he crashed to the ground.

  The third ganger broke out of his shock at the sudden violence of Stacks’s assault, and raised his shotgun toward the fallen man’s head – but Jensen made sure he never pulled the trigger. Leaping up from where he had fallen, he extended his arm-blade as he moved and ran the MCB through with the blunt tip. As the ganger fell, Jensen stumbled toward his fellow fugitive.

  Stacks stared into nothing, trembling with shock. Each breath from his mouth came in a wet, rattling gasp and his clothes were awash with blood. Even with the protective vest Pritchard had found for him, Stacks had been shot at so close a range that the Kevlar weave could not stop the hollowpoint rounds and solid slugs from tearing him apart.

  “Ah hell…” Jensen reached for him. “Stacks, no…”