Deus Ex: Black Light

by James Swallow

  “I’m… killed.” He forced out the words with a low gurgle of blood. His eyes found Jensen, tried to focus. “How… did this happen to us, brother?” He shook, racked with agonized sobs. “Look what… they did!”

  “Good grief…” Over the infolink, Pritchard made a retching sound as the portable camera on Jensen’s webbing caught sight of the damage to the man.

  Out in the corridor, he could hear the rush of more footsteps as other MCBs were drawn by the crash of gunfire. He pulled up the Hurricane machine pistol, aiming it toward the open door.

  Jensen’s throat tightened as he searched for something to say, some platitude to ease the horrible moment, but there was nothing that didn’t seem empty or trite. In his time as a beat cop, Jensen had seen more than his share of gunshot victims, and he didn’t need a paramedic to tell him that Harrison Stacker would be dead in minutes, if not less.

  “I’m sorry.” The words came from nowhere. Stacks nodded at him; it seemed to be enough.

  A blood-flecked, clawed hand clasped Jensen’s shoulder. “You were right back there, in the lab,” he wheezed. “We can’t be animals. We have to be better… but I couldn’t stop. Couldn’t stop myself, Adam. Oh, god forgive me, I did it. I did it.”

  A sickly chill passed through Jensen. “What did you do?” He sensed the answer that was coming, but he couldn’t stop himself from asking.

  “Killed.” It took a massive effort for Stacks to force the word out of his lips. This was his confession, and he had to voice it. “I never told anyone… when that damned… signal came.” His metal hand scraped across the wet floor, almost of its own free will. “My family…” He shuddered, and coughed up a gush of fluid. “When it was over, all that was left were the pieces… of them…”

  The blood. The severed limbs. Suddenly it all made a horrible kind of sense. What could it have been like, to be a good man and then lose yourself in a torrent of madness? To awake and find all you loved destroyed, torn to shreds by your own hands?

  Jensen silently cursed Hugh Darrow and his masters in the Illuminati’s inner circle for the lives they had trampled in the search for their lofty, high ideals.

  Stacks gasped with pain and snatched at Jensen’s armor vest, grabbing the firing key for the remote detonator. “I got this,” he choked. “You go. You go, brother, you stop it. You stop it all!” The gang members were close, just seconds away.

  “I will,” he said, with a grim nod. Jensen rose up, catching the stink of the leaking gas in his nostrils. He broke into a sprint back across the chamber, shoving his way through the dangling racks. There was yelling and gunshots behind him as a few of the more daring MCBs ventured into the room, searching for targets.

  He didn’t see if Stacks triggered the detonator deliberately, or if it was some random nerve impulse that contracted his mechanical hand, but there was a sudden hammer of noise and fire at his back that pushed him up and off his feet, straight into the other doors at the far end of the recycling bay.

  Jensen came through them like a cannonball, his eye shields snapping shut to protect him from the blast as he spun through the air. A fat plume of orange fire and black smoke followed him into the area past the bay, emerging across from a loading dock laden with empty polymer crates that scattered under the force of the explosion.

  The world spun madly around him and Jensen collided with a storage rack that broke apart beneath him. The shrill ringing of the concussion echoed through his ears. Even with the aural augmentations in his skull, for long seconds all Jensen could hear was a high-pitched tone and a broken, random buzzing that made his jawbone itch.

  As he hauled himself up, ignoring the sharp flares of pain across his body, the buzzing resolved itself into Pritchard’s voice. “Jensen? Jensen, respond! I lost all the cameras, I don’t have any visuals…”

  “Still here,” he grunted. “Stacks… He took another way out.”

  “Oh.” The bleak import of Jensen’s words hung in the air. “All right. You need to get moving. Red flags are springing up all across the utility grid in that area, the fire from that explosion is only going to spread…” He paused, and Jensen took the moment to get his bearings.

  As Pritchard noted, the fire from the ruptured gas main was quickly taking hold, and the MCBs in the loading area had lost all sense of purpose other than self-preservation. Jensen caught sight of Cali, shouting at another of the gangers to get the last of their spoils on to the trucks, rather than abandon them to the flames.

  “Something else,” said the hacker. “More coded com broadcasts in your area. But its military-grade encryption, I can’t co-opt it.”

  “Same as before?”

  “I can’t tell…”

  He shook his head. “Never mind,” said Jensen, moving out of cover. He watched as Cali sprinted across the loading dock, finding Magnet with a shotgun in his hand and a murderous expression on his face. “I’m not done here yet.”

  In the chaos from the explosion and the growing inferno, Jensen’s presence was now of less importance to the MCBs than securing their bounty before the warehouse came apart. As he sprinted along a walkway, Jensen heard the crash of breaking glass and the groan of damaged girders. Time was not on his side, but he couldn’t risk getting out of the area without being sure – sure that these military prototypes were not getting out into the world, sure that whoever was behind it was going to pay the price. And that person had to be the voice that was talking to the gang leader, Magnet. He had the next link in the chain.

  Flecks of Stacks’s blood dotted Jensen’s armor and his face, and a hard-burning rage was rising in his chest. In that moment, he needed someone to hold responsible, someone he could punish for the wasteful death of an ordinary man who had gone in harm’s way because he believed in Jensen’s crusade. It won’t be for nothing, he told himself, making a silent vow. I will stop this.

  He had only a split-second to make his choice, and Jensen did it without pause. He vaulted a safety rail and came down with the machine pistol at the ready.

  “You!” he shouted at the thug with the gold optics. “You’re coming with me!”

  Magnet swore violently as he saw Jensen emerge out of the smoke, and he shoved Cali toward him. “Man, who the fuck is this guy? Waste him!” As Cali drew his gun, Magnet sprinted away, more than happy to let his lieutenant deal with the troublesome intruder.

  “You gonna pay for what you did, you son-of-a—” Jensen didn’t let Cali get the rest of the words out, instead firing a burst of bullets down in a low arc that shredded the ganger’s all-too-organic ankles and shins. Cali went down in a howling heap, his augmented arms clawing at the bloody ruins of his legs.

  Jensen came in and kicked Cali’s gun away into the smoke, before letting off another spray of rounds into the wheels of the nearest truck. He aimed the Hurricane’s muzzle at Cali’s head as he loaded a fresh ammo magazine. “Where’s Magnet going? Who’s behind all this? Answer me!”

  Cali whined in agony. “Offices upstairs or some shit, hadda get somethin’… The rest, I don’t know! Who gives a damn?”

  Jensen looked away. “Reckon you can make it to safety if you start crawling right now,” he growled, as nearby part of the roof crumpled and fell inward. “Or maybe not. Your call.”

  As Cali scrambled desperately toward the open loading gates, Jensen peered up into the thickening smoke. He felt the flutter in his chest as his rebreather kicked in, the implant acting like a micro-lung air reservoir. It wouldn’t last forever, but he guessed Magnet wasn’t going to stick around. “Pritchard, gimme a waypoint. I need to find the offices.”

  “You should be leaving, not going upstairs,” came the irritable reply, as a marker icon popped into view on the heads-up display projected directly on to Jensen’s cyberoptics.

  “Just find me that way out,” he snapped, and broke into a run.

  * * *

  He caught Magnet inside a corner office where the door had been kicked off its hinges. The gang leader was tearing
the base of a desktop computer from its mount, in the process of stuffing it into a backpack. His shotgun was lying nearby, and he lunged for it, the awkward mass of the pack pulling him off balance.

  Jensen fired high, bracketing Magnet with a full-auto burst. The sound merged with the clanging of the warehouse’s fire alarm. He wanted the gang leader alive, to find out what he knew, but Magnet didn’t flinch from the gunshots.

  The MCB snatched at the Widowmaker and let off three chugging blasts in quick succession, firing wild to put Jensen off-balance. It had the desired effect, and he was forced to duck back out into the corridor.

  Magnet cocked back his heavy cyberlimb, activating a piston accelerator in the forearm that turned it into a fist-sized battering ram. With a massive crash, he punched clear through the nearest wall and threw himself through the gap into the adjoining office.

  Jensen ran after him down the corridor, as Magnet repeated the action over and over. The two men exchanged fire through windows and open doors as they ran, shot and bullets cutting through the smoky air. Belatedly, the damaged fire suppression system activated and sprinklers in the ceiling came on, instantly drenching everything in a hissing downpour.

  “The only way out is past me,” Jensen shouted. “Toss your gun and you can still walk out of here!”

  Magnet’s answer was another salvo of shotgun blasts that chewed great divots out of the walls around Jensen. He broke cover and kicked open an access door that led to the roof, vanishing through it before Jensen could draw a bead.

  “Where the hell is he going?” Jensen muttered.

  Pritchard’s voice buzzed in his head. “Something’s going on out there. I’m reading disruptions in what’s left of the local data grid… This isn’t the MCBs, Jensen, there’s another hacker…”

  He didn’t have time to acknowledge the message. Every moment he hesitated, Magnet would extend his chance to escape and the truth about what was happening in Detroit would be lost. Jensen steeled himself and kicked open the access door, ready to duck back inside if Magnet was lying in wait. But instead, he saw the gang leader running along an elevated catwalk toward the rear of the warehouse, where a sky bridge connected it to the rest of the manufacturing plant. His escape route.

  If Magnet made it across and down into the back alleys of Milwaukee Junction, he was as good as gone. Ignoring the plumes of smoke rising up from the skylights, and the dangerous creaking of the fracturing roof, Jensen let the Hurricane drop on its sling and sprinted after Magnet, the synthetic muscles in his augmented legs reconfiguring into sprint mode for maximum speed across the short, straight-line distance.

  He was on the gang leader in a heartbeat, kicking off a guide rail to propel him up and then back down. Magnet whirled, firing as he moved, and a hot gush of exhaust gas seared Jensen’s face as the blast narrowly missed taking his head off. He landed a powerful blow on Magnet’s shoulder where his aug arm connected to his torso, and the shock of impact knocked them both apart again.

  Jensen recovered faster, reacting with reflex-boosted instinct, and slapped away Magnet’s weapon. The Widowmaker spun over the guide rail and skidded away across the sloped rooftop. The gang leader staggered back, triggering the heavy-punch piston again, cocking it to throw a strike at Jensen’s head – but his opponent’s arm bent back on itself in a move that no human limb could have made, snatching at the grip of the dangling machine pistol.

  The Hurricane came up to aim at Magnet’s broad chest and Jensen blew out a breath. “End of the line,” he snarled. “I want to know who is running you.”

  “Man, screw you,” Magnet retorted. “No-one runs the Bangers but me!”

  “Jensen…” Pritchard’s voice carried a distinct note of fear. “They’ve got the trucks moving… They’re clearing out!”

  He ignored the hacker for the moment, concentrating on his improvised interrogation “Who told you to get the augs? Where are you taking them?”

  “Goodwill,” spat the ganger.

  Jensen shook his head and he went for a different approach. “Try again. You’re just punks with big mouths and poor impulse control. You’re not smart enough to shift gear like this on your own… Or are they playing you? Did the man in charge tell you what it’s really worth?”

  His ploy worked, and for a moment a flicker of doubt crossed Magnet’s face. “Ain’t no man in charge, asshole…” He straightened. “Shoot me, if you gonna do it.”

  “Jensen!” This time Pritchard’s shout couldn’t be ignored. “Listen to me! You’ve got company!”

  From out of nowhere, a thunderous downdraft blasted across the roof, spinning the plumes of smoke into vortices, and both men staggered beneath the blasts of hot exhaust fumes. Jensen reacted without thinking, looking up just as a blazing spotlight snapped on, drenching the surrounding area in white light and hard-edged shadows. The anti-glare coating of his eye shields lessened the effect, but it was still dazzling. He made out the shape of a bulky, drum-shaped VTOL suspended on four tilt-thrusters at the end of stubby winglets, turning slowly against the night sky.

  Magnet saw the opportunity and made use of Jensen’s distraction, scrambling to his feet, up and over the rail. Jensen saw him move and went after him, skidding across the corrugated metal of the roof – but the gang leader was already out of his reach.

  Without hesitating, Magnet threw himself off the ledge and into a three-story fall straight toward the tarmac below. The fall would have left anyone else shattered and broken, but an instant after the gang leader dropped away, a glowing sphere of electromagnetic force flashed into existence around him and slowed his descent enough to let him hit the ground and survive. Like Jensen, the MCB’s augmentations included an Icarus implant, a technology originally developed for military use to assist in high-altitude low-opening parachute jumps. Magnet was right at the edge of the aug’s operational envelope and he landed badly, but still well enough to stagger away. Jensen swore as one of the six-wheeler trucks he had seen in the loading bay slewed around to pick up the gang leader.

  But before he could react to that, the lights from the heavy VTOL overhead shifted around him as the aircraft moved and a cluster of drifting, wavering crimson dots appeared on his chest and throat. The VTOL dropped until it was level with the roof, and he saw that it was a cargo-carrier model, the central section a square metal container with sliding panels open to the air. Figures rendered into black shadows by the backwash of the spotlight were aiming angular weapons in his direction.

  He hesitated, his finger on the Hurricane’s trigger but the weapon’s muzzle aiming at the roof beneath his feet. Jensen knew that if he moved, a dozen guns would cut him down in an instant. The fact that the new arrivals hadn’t immediately opened fire made him suspect there was more going on than he knew.

  Three figures in black leapt from the VTOL’s crew bay to the rooftop, and they came into the light with flechette rifles raised, the muzzles of the FR-27s and their laser sights all tracking together. The closest to him was a blonde woman with an athlete’s build and sharp European features, and as she stepped forward, she cocked her head and subvocalized something. She was talking on another infolink channel. Jensen remembered Pritchard’s earlier warning.

  For a long second, it seemed like the woman was going to execute him then and there, but then her expression shifted into something like weary resignation. “Police! Lose the gun!” She shouted the words so he could hear her over the constant rumble of the VTOL thrusters. “Put up your hands, unless you want to stay here and burn to death!”

  They carried themselves like professionals, Jensen noted. This crew were way past the random, thuggish threat of Magnet and the MCBs – and so they were a lot more dangerous.

  Jensen nodded, as if he was going to comply, but in his mind the exact reverse was his intention. He peered at the roof beneath his feet, using the micro-miniature t-wave lenses in his smart-vision optics to see through the thin metal to the gantries and floors below. “Pritchard,” he muttered, his wor
ds drowned out by the engine noise. “I got a situation here.”

  “I know. I was the one who told you, remember?” The hacker’s nasal sneer made his jaw itch. “I’m going to distract them. There’s a sewer tunnel under the southwest corner of the building. How you get from where you are to there, I can’t help you with.”

  “Last chance!” shouted the woman. The red thread of the targeting lasers lifted to dance across his eye shields.

  In the next second, an ear-splitting shriek of feedback crashed over the infolink and Jensen cried out in pain. It was as if someone had jammed a spike into his skull, and he staggered with the force of it – but so did the woman and her companions, and the effect must have been felt by the VTOL pilot as well, as the spotlight suddenly blurred away as the aircraft rolled to the left before abruptly course-correcting itself.

  Jensen gritted his teeth and unloaded a full clip of bullets from the Hurricane into the roof, cutting an arc through the corrugated metal. Already weakened, it gave way like a trap door and he fell into a haze of hot, choking smoke.

  Gunshots followed him into the raging fire, but Jensen was already gone, vanishing into the flames.

  SEVEN

  THE RIALTO – DETROIT – UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  Jensen kept to the shadows, slipping from one pool of darkness to another, pausing every few moments to listen carefully for any ambient sound. Once in a while, he glanced up, wary of the sudden appearance of a black shadow high over the alleyway; but nothing came.

  Whatever the identity of the strike team he’d encountered at the Sarif factory – Jensen put little stock in their claim to be ‘police’ – they were clearly a professional crew, and every step of the way along his escape from Milwaukee Junction, he had been looking over his shoulder for them. He wanted to believe that he was out of their grasp, but it was two hours now since Jensen had last had radio contact with Pritchard and he suspected the worst.

  The hacker had been right about the sewer access beneath the building, but to reach it meant a run through an inferno. The shabby surplus jacket Jensen had been wearing since Alaska had burned off his back, and without his rebreather implant and smart-vision optics he would never have made it through the thick, choking smoke filling the warehouse annex. Wading through the waist-deep filth of the sewer pipe was practically a relief, and by the time he crawled out of a manhole a kilometer away, Jensen was on the verge of collapse. His bio-cells were at a low ebb, his lungs felt like they had been filled with metal shavings, and every step was an effort.