Deus Ex: Black Light

by James Swallow

  He was fast enough to block the fall with his hand, and for long seconds it became a contest of hardware – the exacting, precise mechanism of Jensen’s Sarif-built cyberarm versus the brute-force power of Belle’s Tai Yong-made augmetic leg.

  In her eyes there was nothing but raw hate. “You’ll pay!” Belle cried. But Jensen would never learn what personal cost the woman was trying to balance.

  There was motion in the corner of his eye and suddenly Stacks was there, his face bloodied, swinging a fire extinguisher like a club. The unit connected with the side of Belle’s head and she was knocked away. Stacks’s dual-thumbed hand came down and grabbed Jensen’s, hauling him up.

  Belle rolled and rose on one knee as the rest of the angry crowd closed ranks behind her, but before they could react Jensen snatched the extinguisher from Stacks and aimed the nozzle at them. He thumbed the trigger and sprayed an arc of freezing, choking CO2 gas at them, stopping any new attack in its tracks. “Enough!” he snarled.

  The day room’s doors crashed open and a dozen orderlies came rushing in with electro-prods drawn, shouting out orders and making threats. Thorne followed them, scanning the room with a measuring gaze. Jensen let the extinguisher drop and raised his hands as the rest of the processees reluctantly did the same. He saw Belle give Thorne a questioning look that the federal agent completely ignored, and Jensen knew immediately that she had been the one who revealed the circumstances of his recovery from Panchaea.

  “You have a knack for getting yourself into difficulty, Mr. Jensen.” Thorne looked him up and down, sparing Stacks a brief glance.

  “It happens.” He wiped a trickle of blood from his lip. “Why are you still here?”

  “I told you, we are not done. And it seems I was right to take a closer interest in you.”

  Jensen’s lip curled. “Bullshit. You made this happen. Trying to soften me up?”

  Thorne’s gaze drifted back to Stacks. “Things can go wrong during incarceration. It brings out the worst in people.”

  “Thought this was a clinic, not a prison,” Stacks muttered. “More fool me.”

  She paid no attention to the other man’s comment. “I think it would be best to isolate you from the general population for the moment, Mr. Jensen. Until we can resolve things.” Thorne beckoned over three of the orderlies. “Take him across to the segregation block and hold him there.”

  Jensen knew the place she meant. He’d seen it on his walks of the facility’s perimeter, a prefabricated blockhouse set off on its own. It was supposed to be there to house any processee suffering from an infectious illness, but Jensen imagined that function was as much a smokescreen as the main complex’s stated purpose. One of the orderlies gave him a shove, but he resisted. “What about him?” He nodded toward Stacks.

  “What about him?” Thorne repeated. “He’ll go back to his bunk. He’s not my concern.”

  Jensen saw the shadow of denied vengeance on the faces of Belle and the other residents, and he knew that if they couldn’t get to him, they would take it out on Stacks. The man would be punished for being kind enough to show Jensen some friendship. “No. It’s not safe for him here.”

  “I’ll be okay, brother,” Stacks said quietly, unable to mask his fear. “Don’t worry none…”

  “Always the policeman, aren’t you, Adam?” Thorne sniffed. “Protect and serve? And here with a man you hardly even know. If you’d read Harrison Stacker’s file, you might think differently.”

  Jensen let that pass without comment. “You leave him here, he’ll wind up with a shiv in his ribs.”

  Thorne folded her arms, silently evaluating them both. Then she nodded. “Of course. You’re right.” She gestured to the orderlies. “Take Mr. Stacker as well. We’ll keep him out of harm’s way… for as long as we can.”

  The orderly shoved Jensen again and this time he moved, falling into step with Stacks as the guards drew in around them. Jeers from Belle followed them out into the corridor.

  “I’m sorry,” Jensen said quietly. “Thorne’s got an axe to grind with me and you took some of the blowback.”

  Stacks eyed him. “Just tell me that Belle was wrong. You and that bastard Darrow—”

  “Hugh Darrow is dead because of me,” Jensen said, cutting him off. “Believe that.”

  They walked on in silence through 451’s narrow corridors, and Jensen’s mind sifted through the rapidly collapsing series of options before him.

  Thorne’s bit of theater back in the day room had all been calculated to push him off-balance, and Jensen knew that his gut-check distrust of the agent had been right on the money. She had put Stacks in danger to draw him in, set up the rest of the facility’s residents against Jensen so he had no support, all of it to give him nowhere to go but back to her. Sending him to isolation would give her full control over what happened next, and on the surface, asking for Stacks to be pulled out of the communal bunks seemed like he had handed her another tool to use against him.

  He played it out in his head. Thorne would threaten to send Stacks back into the general population and Belle’s tender mercies, unless Jensen gave her what she wanted. She’d lean on his innate instinct to stick up for the defenseless. It was more textbook interrogation technique.

  Jensen studied Stacks out of the corner of his eye, wondering. Was the other detainee part of Thorne’s elaborate game? The agent had manipulated Belle, had she done the same to Stacks? Can I trust him?

  Stacks saw him looking and frowned. “What Thorne said, ’bout my file… she’s right. I did some bad things… I didn’t have a choice…”

  Jensen nodded. “I know how that goes.” He listened to his instincts, and all of them were telling him this man was being played as much as he was. Guess I’ll find out for sure.

  * * *

  The orderlies led them outside and they trudged through a cold, sleeting rain falling from the relentlessly gray sky.

  “How long have you been here?” Jensen said, addressing the question to Stacks but looking straight ahead.

  “You asked me that already,” said the other man. “I told you. Since the incident.”

  “When were you supposed to rotate out?”

  “They said six months,” Stacks sighed. “But then Doc Rafiq, she said it would take longer. And so it goes.”

  “I’ve been here six days.” Jensen flexed his hands and tensed. “And that’s long enough.”

  The plan he had was half-formed, just pieces that didn’t come together in any way that could be certain of working. But what Jensen was certain of was that Agent Thorne had no plans to ease up on him now. If she was capable of risking the life of an innocent man just to get Jensen where she wanted, there would be no way to evade her reach inside Facility 451. His time was about to run out.

  The inhibitor bracelet on Jensen’s arm dialed down a lot of the key functions of his augmentations, but the neuromuscular facilitator implant in his torso was too broadly distributed to be so easily impeded. It didn’t exactly allow him to dodge bullets, but in a combat situation the NMF aug made his reflexes fire much faster than baseline human norms. He triggered the ‘Quicksilver’ and without warning his hand snapped out like a striking cobra, grabbing the wrist of the nearest orderly.

  The man had an electro-prod in his grip, the activator switch in the on position. Before the guard could react, Jensen made the first of a series of gambles and yanked him close, jamming the prod’s emitter tip into the frame of the metallic inhibitor.

  A searing electric shock crackled over his cyberarm, making the artificial myomer muscles jerk and twitch – but the risk paid off as the string of indicator lights ringing the bracelet winked out.

  The orderly shouted a warning, and the other two guards turned on Jensen and Stacks.

  Stacks brought up his big industrial cyberarms and blocked the other guards while Jensen dealt with the first. The man caught on quick, he noted.

  With the inhibitor dead, Jensen felt a surge of energy as the rest of his aug
s reactivated in quick succession. Indicator glyphs blinked in the corner of his vision. But he didn’t have a lot of power to spare, so each choice he made would have to count.

  Swinging around, Jensen struck the struggling orderly across the face with the heel of his hand, intentionally pulling the blow for a knockout rather than a fatal hit. The guard went down into the slushy snow and lay there, groaning in pain. Jensen ripped off the dead inhibitor and threw it away, still clutching the electro-prod.

  Stacks shouted wordlessly as the other guards swiped at him with their own weapons. The ex-steeplejack snatched a fistful of one orderly’s jacket and tossed him toward Jensen, at the same time swinging his heavy-duty arm back and forth toward the third man.

  Jensen met his next opponent by jamming the prod into his stomach. The weapon discharged with a low, buzzing hum and the orderly’s cry of pain was cut short as he was shocked unconscious.

  “Code Red! Code Red!” shouted the last guard, yelling into a handheld radio he plucked from his belt. “We got a—”

  “Shut your mouth!” Stacks yelled, and closed the big, talon-like fingers of his cyberlimb around the orderly’s hand. The guard screamed as Stacks crushed flesh, bone and plastic into a broken mess. Then, with a brutal shove, he propelled the last man away and to the ground. He rounded on Jensen. “Shit, man! You could have warned me you were gonna go for it!”

  “Didn’t know myself until just now.” He jogged across to the high fence, scanning the buildings on the far side, picking out the shapes of snow-dusted trucks and jeeps. “Vehicle park just over there… We need to—”

  “I got this.” Stacks pushed him aside and flexed his artificial arms.

  “Let me help you with that.” Jensen found the inhibitor he wore and pressed the prod to its surface. “This is gonna hurt.” He didn’t wait for Stacks to reply, and fired a crackling surge of voltage into the device.

  Stacks cried out in pain, and Jensen caught the acrid stink of burning plastic. Then suddenly the other man was at the fence line, clawed fingers tearing into the metal links. Sparks flew in showers of orange as he ripped open a ragged tear in the enclosure, and belatedly sirens began to sound across the length of the compound.

  Above the sirens, Jensen heard a high-pitched whine and glimpsed an insect-like shape rising off the roof of the main building, angling toward them. “Drone incoming! We gotta move!”

  Discarding his burnt-out inhibitor, Stacks shouldered his way through the inner fence and repeated his destructive actions at the outer line. Jensen followed him through and out. For what seemed like the first time in forever, both men were beyond the walls of the complex that had confined them – but they were far from being free.

  Guards emerged from the isolation block and the main building, hooded figures seen through the rain as it came down harder. Jensen’s optics picked out weapons in their hands. Not stunners this time, but short-frame bullpup flechette rifles.

  “Your show now, man!” said Stacks. “What do we do?”

  “You know how to hotwire a truck?” Jensen jabbed a finger toward a pick-up parked a few meters away, the flatbed piled high with maintenance gear and spares. It was an older, gasoline-powered model from the 2010s, more reliable in the colder Alaskan temperatures than modern hybrids or e-cars.

  “Hotwire?” Stack repeated. “What, they never teach you that in cop school?”

  Jensen’s reply died in his throat as something fast whistled past his head, dropping to skitter away across the wet tarmac. He whirled around just in time to see a second object strike Stacks harmlessly on the ironclad shoulder of his aug arm. A tranquilizer dart.

  “Start it up!” he shouted, catching sight of the drone again as the airborne robot pivoted in mid-air. The bigger cousin to the little monitors that buzzed about the corridors of 451, this unit was the size of a soccer ball, held between four spinning rotors, with a chin turret of sensors surrounding the black barrel of a tranq gun.

  The drone took aim, but as it fired again Jensen dashed toward it, shortening the distance so the dart shot went wide and hit nothing. Sweeping down into a low turn, he scooped up a wad of dirty slush from the ground and threw it at the hovering drone. The makeshift snowball struck its camera eye with a wet smack and the drone’s rotors shrilled in complaint as the unit momentarily lost its target.

  Behind him, Jensen heard Stacks grunt with effort and then the crunching grind of tearing metal. He turned to see that the other man had ripped off the door to the pick-up and now stood hunched over the steering wheel, yanking at wires. Jensen sprinted back to the vehicle, pulling down the tailgate, looking for anything to use as a weapon.

  “Ha-ha!” Stacks let out a cry of victory as the truck’s motor turned over and caught. “We’re rollin’ now!”

  “Not yet…” Jensen snatched at a length of metal rebar and dragged it out of the flatbed as the drone shook off his distraction and came diving at them. For a moment, he held it like an over-long sword, wondering if he could swat the robot out of the air before it pegged him with another dart. But then something better occurred to him, and he let the targeting augmentation keyed to his cyberoptics go active. Jensen turned the rod in his hand until he held it like a javelin, and at the last second he threw it into the air. The blunt tip of the rebar struck the drone with enough force to dislocate one of its rotors, and it plummeted into a crash spiral.

  More shots cracked at Jensen’s heels – lethal flechette rounds now – as the guards came through their improvised exit. Stacks was already pulling away, the pick-up’s wheels spitting ice and rainwater as he slewed it around toward the highway.

  “Come on!” he bellowed. “Run, damn it!”

  Jensen broke into a sprint and leapt the last half-meter to the tailgate, scrambling aboard as other loose items spilled out on to the road. “Gun it!” he shouted back, as a round cracked against the bodywork.

  “Oh yeah,” Stacks called back, stepping on the gas pedal and aiming the truck into the wall of rain. “Let’s make those bastards work for it!”

  * * *

  The service track from Facility 451 joined a road that crossed the peninsula, and from Stacks’s reading of the pick-up’s sat-nav screen, it connected up to a bigger interstate freeway a few miles further on.

  Jensen slipped into the cab alongside him and confirmed what he already suspected. The pick-up had only local tags, and no clearance for interstate travel, which meant the moment they took to the freeway, police drones would be scrambled to intercept them.

  “That’s gonna happen no matter what,” said Stacks. “Odds are, our pals back at the ranch are calling the State Troopers right now with a description of these wheels.”

  Jensen shook his head. “I don’t think so. I know how these people work. Thorne’s gonna use her own assets to come after us first. Locals will be a last resort.”

  Stacks shot him a look. “These people?” he echoed. “Ain’t that the World Health Organization you’re talking about? You make ’em sound like the, what, the CIA.”

  “You just spent eighteen months being held prisoner by them,” Jensen shot back. “You tell me.”

  “Fair point…” Stacks conceded. “Shit. This is all fucked up.”

  “No argument here.” Jensen leaned over the sat-nav screen, scrolling around the map. “Look, there’s an automated service station where the roads link up. Head there. We’ll ditch this thing, find another vehicle.”

  Stacks scowled. “Hate to break it to you, brother, but if you and me ain’t the only humans within fifty miles of that, I’d owe you a buck. Nothing but them goddamn big-ass robo-trucks run up and down this stretch of road, from Anchorage down to the border or back to the oil wells. Alla that acid rain and everything, Alaska don’t get tourists no more. Towns round here are dead and gone.”

  “I know,” said Jensen. “And I got a way we can use that. We get on board one of those automated rigs, we can ride it down to Juneau, get a connection back to the States. Put as much distance as we
can between us and Facility four-five-one.”

  “I hear you,” Stacks said, with feeling. “But you forgetting, those mechs have killer security, yeah? Don’t take no hitch-hikers.”

  “Yeah.” Jensen ran a hand over the hexagonal plate above his right eye, bringing another of his augmentations back to life. “I know a guy who can help us with that.”

  SOLDOTNA STATION – ALASKA – UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  As Stacks predicted, the auto-station was utterly devoid of human life, and likely had been for a long time. A few faceless tanker trucks emblazoned with corporate logos, their prows bristling with antennae and sensor palps, filled machine-controlled refueling bays where spidery crane arms fed power umbilicals into waiting slots on their flanks. Jensen watched one of them finish topping up the charge in its massive batteries, and detach itself with a surge of movement. The robotic vehicle cruised past him toward the freeway on-ramp, infrared running lights flicking on. A shocker turret mounted on the side of the tanker turned to track him as he stood there, a mute warning to stay away. The simple artificial intelligences that drove these trucks had only a cursory interest in humans, as either obstacles to be avoided or potential hijackers to be terminated. The price of real fossil fuel made the theft of such transporters from the vast Alaskan fracking fields an ongoing problem, so the machines were programmed to automatically distrust anything organic that approached them.

  Jensen watched it go, accelerating to over a hundred miles per hour in a skirl of tire noise. He frowned and looked away, considering his next move. They didn’t have a lot of time, maybe a twenty-minute lead on their pursuers at best. He would need to work quickly.

  The auto-station had some cursory shelter, an afterthought built into the place on the off-chance that someone flesh-and-blood might be unfortunate enough to find themselves stranded out here. Behind a thick, windproof door with failing seals, chairs and tables made out of a kind of extruded polymer were lined up across from a fetid chemical toilet, an emergency phone, a broken wall-screen and a pair of vending machines that were out of order. The latter hadn’t stopped Stacks from using his augmented strength to peel open their shells and help himself to what was still inside. Jensen eyed the bloated cans of expired Nuke Cola, the crumbling packs of Soy, and grimaced.