Deus Ex: Black Light (17 page)

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 words 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.

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.

But one look over his shoulder at the glow of the fires told him he had to keep going. Such destruction would have to bring the DPD in to investigate, and he needed to be far away when they finally arrived. He felt a knife of guilt twist in his gut over Stacks and the brutal fate that befell him.
The man’s death is on me
, he thought grimly.
I took him into harm’s way and he wasn’t up to it. Pritchard was right. I should’ve listened
.

On his way back to the derelict cinema, Jensen picked over his reasons again and again. He wanted badly to strike at the people who had robbed him of so much, to lash out at the shadowy cabal manipulating events from on high… and with his mind set on that, he hadn’t stopped to consider if Harrison Stacker was really ready to stand with him. Now a deeply troubled, damaged soul was dead and any chance he might have had at redemption was gone with him.

A bleak question gathered in Jensen’s thoughts. Pritchard had been an irritating, arrogant ass for as long as he had known him, but by the same token he had always been brutally honest with Jensen. There were few people, he reflected, that he could truthfully say that about. And if Pritchard had been right about Stacks, was he right about this road that Jensen had started down?
My crusade, he called it
…

“Where the hell do I go from here…?” Jensen said the words aloud, looking across the alley to the back entrance of the old building. But no answer was forthcoming. He could see the metal security door hanging open in the gloom, and his fingers gripped the butt of the Hurricane machine pistol hanging at his side. Was Pritchard in there, collapsed over his keyboard with a bullet hole between his eyes? Had Jensen’s single-minded need for retribution cost the life of someone else tonight?

There was only one way to find out. He couldn’t chance the energy drain of using the cloak; this would have to be a direct approach.

The Hurricane’s magazine was half full. Jensen extended the gun’s wire-frame stock and pulled it to his shoulder, moving low and fast to the door. He circled the entrance, peering into the semi-darkness within, then slipped inside.

The random clutter of the interior worked in his favor, meaning that no shooter with a high vantage would be able to get a clear sight-line and shoot him as soon as he entered – but it also meant that Jensen couldn’t gauge what kind of threat might be waiting for him. His cyberoptics cycled through vision modes, looking for the telltale threads of an invisible ultraviolet targeting laser or the bloom of heat from a concealed gunman. He saw nothing.

Although most of the movie theater looked like the aftermath of a bomb explosion as a matter of course, Jensen saw no signs that Pritchard’s remote mines had been triggered. That meant that whoever had opened the door and taken the hacker off the air was capable and dangerous. He thought about the black-clad woman on the roof and her unit. They certainly fit that profile.

Moving around a heap of rubble that had fallen from the ceiling, Jensen caught sight of the stage. Nothing had been upset, everything was untouched. He made out a motionless figure sitting in a chair, back-lit by the glow of a monitor screen – thin, angular, with an unkempt ponytail hanging over his shoulder.

For a long second, Jensen thought Pritchard was dead, but then the hacker gave a low sigh and looked off to his right, where shadows fell thick and deep. “How long do you expect me to sit here?” he asked.

“Clearly, until you learn the meaning of
stay there and don’t say a goddamn word
.” The terse reply had a Hispanic lilt to it, and presently a woman in a baggy civilian pilot’s jumpsuit emerged from the darkness. A heavy Diamondback revolver dangled at the end of one of her hands, and she crossed toward Pritchard, her manner lazy but her eyes alert. Her hair was short in a mix of cornrows and a semi-military cut, revealing a lengthy augmentation scar running from just above her left brow in an arc that ended behind her ear. She wore the mark like a badge of honor, but the woman’s gear and her swagger didn’t chime with the team Jensen had run into at the manufacturing plant. He had the immediate sense that he was looking at a brand new player here, someone with an agenda of their own.