Deus Ex - Icarus Effect

by James Swallow

  Saxon straightened the Kevlar balaclava over his face and peered through his polarized eye-shields. Ahead he could see the roof of the Hotel

  Novoe Rostov. The team had reviewed the deployment on the way from the airport, and they were ready.

  He took a breath and ran through his own internal checklist, ending it with a last look at the ammo selector on the Hurricane tactical machine

  pistol that hung from his shoulder strap. The compact submachine gun was all ABS plastic and black-anodized steel, the blunt muzzle lost

  behind a triangular suppressor.

  "Twenty seconds." Namir's words came over his mastoid, buzzing in Saxon's skull. The subvocalized radio message had the peculiar echo to it

  that made encrypted comms sound as if they were being beamed down from space.

  Saxon frowned. They were cutting it fine. The sun was rising, and the morning light would cost them good cover if they didn't move fast. Then

  Hardesty spoke over the general channel.

  "Inposition"he said. "Three targets. Green light."

  Namir gave an imperceptible nod. "Execute."

  Saxon turned to the window in time to see a man on the roof of the Rostov looking up at them, raising a handheld to his ear; in the next second

  the man jerked violently backward as if pulled by an invisible wire, a jet of red spurting from his chest. As the helo descended, he spotted the

  other guards on the roof, collapsing in puffs of pink mist.

  The helo fell into a hover ten meters up, and the rest of the Tyrants deployed, Barrett and Hermann leading, then Namir and Saxon, with

  Federova last.

  Saxon tensed; he was used to fast-roping, but his new high-fall aug—part of the "recruitment package"—meant he could drop straight into the

  thick without a descender cord. The whole thing was counterintuitive, but it worked. He jumped, and a moment before he landed, a brief pulse

  of electromagnetic energy flared around him, cushioning his fall. He landed squarely, the crackle of the effect generated by the augmentation taking the shock and bleeding it off to nothing.

  Federova put down a heartbeat later, cat-falling with little more than a crunch of gravel. She had her hair back behind an Alice band studded

  with data loops, but no hood. Federova saw him looking and gazed back, languid and unconcerned.

  With a gust of downwash, the helo powered into the sky. He looked away, scanning the rooftop. The Rostov was a shallow, three-lobed tower

  that had been thrown up in the boom years of the early 2010s, but never completed. There were whole floors of the building that were locked

  off, still unfinished over a decade later.

  "Blue, Green," said Namir, using Barrett and Hermann's call signs. "Secure the roof. Check for stragglers." He glanced at Saxon. "Gray, with

  me."

  "Roof is clear" Hardesty said, from his firing nest across the square. He didn't like the suggestion that he'd missed someone.

  Low and quick, Saxon followed the Tyrant commander toward the boxy service shack in the middle of the roof. He passed the corpse of the

  man the sniper had shot in the chest, and scanned the body. The dead man had a look of frozen surprise on his face, a foam of red froth on his

  lips. Hardesty's bullet had punctured the heart, the exit wound ripping open the guard's back.

  The man's face triggered a connection to the mission data Saxon had shunted to a temporary memory store in his implanted neural hub; the

  modified wet-drive was another "bonus" from the Tyrants. He blinked up an image from an arrest record. The man lying in the pool of crimson

  was immediately identified as Oleg Pushkin, a minor enforcer with the main Moscow crime syndicate, the Solntsevskaya Bratva. "This guy's a

  mob hitter," Saxon murmured.

  "They all are," Namir replied. "Keep up."

  Barrett was at the service shack as they reached it. Air-conditioning equipment, heat exchangers, and cable gear for the Rostov's elevator

  banks hummed inside.

  Namir nodded at a secured maintenance hatch on the side of the shack. "Open it."

  Hermann leaned close and used a digital lockpick to neutralize the security latches; when he was done, Barrett stepped in and curled his fingers

  around the lip of the hatch with a grimace. The bunches of myomer muscles in his arms stiffened, gathered—and then with a low howl of

  tortured metal the hatch came away, shearing the bolt heads clean off.

  As Namir peered inside, Saxon glanced over his shoulder and his brow furrowed in confusion. "Where's ... Red?" There was no sign of Federova

  anywhere on the rooftop. She had been only a few steps behind him.

  Barrett chuckled. "She's around."

  "Green," said Namir. "Deny their communications."

  "Complying." Hermann nodded, drawing a thick, disc-shaped object from his backpack. It resembled a land mine. Acting quickly, the German

  set it on the ground and flicked a yellow-and-black-striped activation switch. A flicker of interference momentarily stuttered across Saxon's

  cyberoptics.

  "Target comms are dead," reported Barrett, cocking his head like a dog hearing a whistle. "Ready."

  "Insertion," said Namir. "Go!"

  One after another, they threaded in through the torn-out hatch and into the mass of machinery crowding the interior of the service shack.

  Inside, a triangular cluster of running gear fell away into a series of shafts that ran the length of the Rostov, down to the basement parking

  levels sixteen stories below. Saxon toggled his optics to low-light mode and the space became visible in shades of green and white. The shapes of

  elevator cars were visible, most of them static, others gently rising or descending.

  Namir and Saxon took point, working their way down past the slowly turning drums of support cables and the rumbling lift gears. According to

  their information, Kontarsky and his people were on floor thirteen; outside, the pilot of the helo was watching the windows of the apartments on

  the thirteenth floor, scanning through the vision-opaque glass with a thermographic sensor, watching the body-heat traces of the minister and

  his staff. At this time of day, most of them were asleep; only the guards were supposed to be awake. They had to take care, though; their intel

  wasn't clear on how many, if any, civilians were in the building. Collateral damage was to be kept to an absolute minimum.

  Securing nylon cords to the cable frames, the two of them fast-roped down in silence, pausing at each level to sweep for magnetic anomaly

  detectors or beam sensors. Saxon watched Namir work with speed and delicacy, rendering security systems inert with the skill of a veteran.

  The central lift of a three-block cluster was locked in place at the thirteenth. The plan was to enter through its roof and fan out along the three

  radial corridors—Namir, Hermann, and Saxon taking one each, Barrett holding the core as backup.

  "Prep for breach" Namir sub vocalized. Saxon lowered himself to the top of the elevator car, disconnected his tether, and drew out a

  pressurized canister of det-foam. Dialing the nozzle to narrow feed, he put marble-size blobs of the khaki-toned chemical in the corners of the

  car's roof, then thumbed a set of slaved microdetonators into the congealing foam.

  As he finished, he felt the elevator move slightly beneath him and heard voices. Three men, speaking in Russian. Through an air vent, he could

  see a sliver of what was going on.

  "Shto slüchios?" said one of them. He was tapping the radio headset at his ear, frowning.

  Another man, out of Saxon's sight line, spat in irritation and followed his cohort into the lift. They were leaving their posts; Hermann's trick with

  the communications blackout had spooked them.

  Then the man with the radio gave a slow, owlish bl
ink; Saxon recognized the action. He had implanted optics—he was changing vision modes.

  The guard looked up, and for a fraction of a second Saxon saw a bluish glitter in his right eye. The tell gave away exactly what kind of optic the

  guard was using; a terahertz lens that could see right through light cover. In the next few seconds, everything happened with bullet-fast rapidity. The guard swore explosively and slammed his fist into the control pad,

  sending the elevator into an express plunge to the lobby. The other men in the car dragged their guns up, but they were armed with cut-down

  assault rifles and inside the close confines of the elevator, the size of the guns made them unwieldy.

  Saxon held tight to the car's frame and felt his stomach turn over as the lift dropped away; in the next breath the guards would have a bead on

  him. A spray of blind fire, and he would be ripped to shreds.

  He cursed and did the only thing he could, tapping the detonator key on the control bracelet around his wrist. The blobs of det-foam combusted

  with sharp, smoky reports and the roof of the elevator car collapsed inward, Saxon falling with it. The noise deafened him.

  The confined space became chaotic. The guards cursed and struggled to deflect the debris, lashing out. Saxon had no time to draw a weapon; it

  was like fighting inside a coffin, with no room to maneuver; nothing to do but strike fast and give no quarter.

  He punched the man with the t-wave optic into the wall and the guard's rifle snarled, discharging a three-round burst into the door. Then,

  spinning in place, Saxon drove the armor-plated pad on his elbow into the rib cage of the second guard. He shoved him into a thinscreen along

  the back wall and it fractured, webbing with cracks.

  The third guard was still struggling with his rifle, shouldering aside the remains of a collapsed lighting rig. He launched himself at Saxon and

  slammed the frame of the weapon into his face, cracking his eye-shields. The soldier hit back with a punch from his augmented arm, and

  connected with the guard's ribs. Bones fractured with a sickening crunch and the assailant staggered backward, wheezing.

  Then all three of them attacked him at once, using their guns like clubs to beat him about the head and shoulders. Saxon felt an impact at the

  base of his spine and he stumbled, losing his balance as the elevator continued to drop toward the ground floor. He had no doubts that the

  guards had reinforcements waiting there; he had to finish this quickly.

  Locking his legs, Saxon pivoted and let his reflex booster implant ramp up to full. His nerves jangled with the sudden new input, the influence of

  the neuromuscular accelerator coursing through him. The guards were crowding in and he struck out once more. The man with the cracked ribs

  went back into the doors, slammed into place by the torso of the first guard. Saxon fired a low, fast kick at the leg of the other man and was

  rewarded with a pain-filled yelp. Natural bone broke easily under the turned steel of a heavy augmentation.

  The giddy rush of speed made Saxon's skin prickle; he felt heat wash over him, and in a moment of sudden, shocking scent-memory, he smelled

  aviation fuel and smoke. The crackle of the fires around the crashed veetol were abruptly there in the front of his thoughts, the horrible tearing

  noise as Sam died in front of him—

  Fury spread through Saxon like a wave, and he went in for the kill. The throat of the fallen guard he crushed with a brutal, stabbing blow from

  his cyberarm; then he pulled a broken piece of roof support up from where it had landed and used it to beat the next of the guards bloody. The

  last man, who fought back as he coughed and spat, struck out with a cyberhand that sprouted a fan of blades. Saxon took a cut across his cheek,

  but the pain seemed distant, edited from the moment. He took the guard's arm—a spindly model sheathed in pink, flesh-toned plastic,

  doubtless Federal Army surplus—and bent it back against the joint, fracturing the casing. The guard tried to struggle free, but Saxon took a

  clump of his hair and beat his head into the walls until he fell.

  The elevator chimed and Saxon let the guard's body go, allowing it to fall out and onto the dusty marble floor of the lobby.

  Three more men were waiting for him, standing in a semicircle around the elevator bank, each with a heavy-caliber automatic raised and

  aimed. The data feed from the wet-drive helpfully told him that these men were also members of the Bratva, each with a lengthy police record;

  but the tips of the prison tattoos that emerged from the open collars of their shirts made that clear enough.

  Saxon slowly raised his hands, panting, the moment of animal fury he had felt in the elevator fading as fast as it had come. For a few seconds

  there, he had become lost, absorbed in rage-fueled guilt over Sam, Kano, and all the others. The edges of the dark anger he had first felt in the

  field hospital boiled inside him.

  He knew enough Russian to understand that the men with guns wanted him to kneel down. Carefully, he did what they asked, biding his time.

  One of them would have to come close enough to take the Hurricane from him, and then, if there was a chance

  Something shimmered like oil on water in the corner of Saxon's vision and he turned toward it in time to see a shape emerge out of the air, a

  glassy, swift figure blurred by motion, abruptly becoming solid, real.

  The military called it "mimeoptical active camouflage"; Saxon wasn't up on the full technical specs for the augmentation, but from what he

  knew, the system used a matrix of molecule-thin induction wires implanted beneath the epidermis and across cyberlimb plating that when

  activated, generated a local electromagnetic field that could render a human being into a walking stealth weapon. It was prohibitively expensive

  and delicate under battlefield conditions, and difficulties with the human augmentation interface meant that it was rarely deployed in combat.

  Full synchrony between the user and the system was hard to achieve; to use it well, you had to be someone with a near-pathological focus of

  will.

  The ghost figure became Federova, and she killed the first man with a slashing knife cut to the throat, dispatching the other two with quick,

  silenced bursts from her machine pistol. She trembled slightly as the camouflage effect bled away, the focused EM field dissipating.

  Federova looked across at him as he stood up, her scalp beaded with sweat; and then she smiled.

  "Go tactical" ordered Namir.

  The elevator doors came off their mountings in a screech of torn steel, and Barrett swung out behind them, snorting with effort. He dealt with

  the guard closest to him with a savage backhand punch that drove bone shards up into the man's forebrain. The guard dropped to the

  unfinished concrete floor, twitching as he died. Namir and Hermann came in a heartbeat later, their machine pistols snarling. Armor-piercing

  rounds sprayed in fans, taking more kills.

  One of the guards was still alive, and he stumbled toward a side corridor, bleeding heavily. The German was on him in a moment, and with a

  haymaker punch from his armored fist, he crushed the man's skull with single blow.

  "Move," snarled the commander. The mission was entering its full active phase; now speed, not stealth, was of the essence. Namir glanced