Deus Ex: Black Light

by James Swallow

  There was a sharp, brilliant light that seemed to come from behind his eyes, a sudden sense of dislocation from his body as the neural link engaged – and then Jarreau was in another place entirely.

  * * *

  A deliberately nondescript conference room with a large table surrounded by identical chairs – one of which he was sitting in – and walls with a wood-finish patterning. There was a window that looked out on to a repeating loop of some tranquil, nonexistent hillside under a digitally perfect blue sky, and the only other item of note was a representation of the Interpol symbol, which hung in mid-air above the table like a gravity-defying sculpture.

  A collection of pixels accreted in the seat next to him, forming into an avatar of Raye Vande. She looked much the same as she did in reality, but with the detail dialed down a little. TF29 didn’t have the bandwidth or processing power for total resolution, which had the downside of making everyone in the NSN’s virtual space look like a life-sized toy version of themselves. She gave him a nod, and Jarreau looked down at the digital representations of his hands, flexing his pseudo-plastic fingers.

  The Interpol logo popped like a bubble, briefly replaced by the word “Connecting…” before it disappeared outright and a third person phased into fake solidity across the table from them.

  “This is Miller,” said the new arrival. “You seeing me okay?”

  Jarreau nodded. He introduced himself and Vande, and felt the odd impulse to shake hands. “Appreciate you working with us on this,” he began. “And sorry about the time difference. What is it, morning over there?”

  “It’s four AM in Prague,” Vande told him.

  “Don’t sweat it,” Miller replied, with a weary smile. “Office is quiet this time of day. I get more done.” He leaned forward, and Jarreau got a good look at the man’s avatar. If it was an accurate representation, then Jim Miller appeared to be in his mid-forties, tall in his seat and short-haired, with a weathered aspect to him that even the NSN couldn’t entirely erase. Jarreau knew the type; a veteran cop used to doing the job his way. That was something he could work with. “So, let me tell you what we have at our end and we’ll go from there.” Miller’s hands worked at a keypad that the virtual environment hadn’t rendered, his fingers dancing in the air. “We’ve picked up chatter on our side of the Atlantic. Several persons of interest talking about a consignment of mil-spec augmentations coming out of the States in the next week or so. No details on the supplier, but what we do have is a confirmed ID on the perps that will be making the pick-up.”

  Panes of data unfolded in the air between them, showing intercept records, criminal jackets and surveillance images. Jarreau saw shots taken by a long-lensed camera drone of augmented men wearing dusty combat gear, standing on a desert road.

  “Mercenaries?” he said immediately. There was a subtle kind of tell that career military had about them, a way of carrying themselves even when they were outside a war zone. The men in the pictures had something else, a cocksure manner that set off Jarreau’s instinctive dislike of soldier-of-fortune types.

  “Good eye,” said Miller, with a nod. “Head creep there goes by the alias ‘Sheppard’. His real name is John Trent, but he hasn’t used that in a while. He’s been on our radar for some time.” An icon appeared next to one of the men in the picture, clearly the leader by the way the others deferred to him. “Along with most of his crew, he used to be part of a Strike Team for Belltower Associates.”

  “A bunch of bulls,” offered Vande. “How appropriate.”

  “After the Rifleman scandal broke, Trent and his boys were among those who went AWOL. From what we can tell, they decided to go into the lucrative world of dealing illegal arms, training terrorists and just about anything violent that turns a profit.”

  Vande leaned in to get a better look. “Were they at Rifleman Bank?”

  Miller shook his head. “But he’s no saint. When Belltower downsized and rebranded themselves as Tarvos Security, guys with dirty records like Trent’s were the first to bolt. He’s quick on the trigger, this one. Ruthless, too. He doesn’t care if civilians get caught in the crossfire.”

  “A real charmer.” Jarreau considered Miller’s words. When the story about the private military contractor Belltower, and its involvement in running a black site prison in the Pacific called Rifleman Bank, had hit the news feeds, the company’s carefully presented reputation went into a nosedive. Questions of ethics, rumors about medical experiments being performed on unlawfully held detainees, all of it swirled around and stuck to Belltower’s spit-shined uniform like mud. These days, the company didn’t exist anymore – aside from its last vestiges as Tarvos Security – but in its death throes, Belltower had spat out enough trained, augmented triggermen to make a hell of a lot of trouble for the world’s law enforcers. Case in point, he thought. “Where is this ‘Sheppard’ and his crew now?”

  Miller frowned. “We don’t have eyes on them. Same time we got our intercept, they went dark. Best guess? I think they’re making a low-key transit into the States, probably via Canada.”

  Vande shot Jarreau a questioning look, then turned back to Miller. “Do you have any idea what his endgame is, once he has the augs?”

  Miller pinched the bridge of his nose. “That is a question that has nothing but a lot of unpleasant answers, Agent Vande. Sheppard’s been known to deal with just about anyone. There’s a chance he could trade them on to the Jinn smuggling cartel, maybe to his contacts in the African conflict zone. My personal fear is that he sells them to ARC, and then all bets are off.”

  “I thought the Augmented Rights Coalition were towing the peaceful resistance line,” said Jarreau. The radical pro-augmentation activist group didn’t operate in North America, but he’d seen a security briefing about ARC’s growing presence in the European area of operations. They were centered in the Czech Republic, right on Miller’s doorstep, so it was no wonder he was wary of them.

  “On the surface,” Miller told him. “But we’re hearing rumors of ARC moving toward a much more militant stance.” He spread his hands, and for a moment his avatar shuddered and jumped as parity briefly fell over the NSN’s satellite link. “You see now why I don’t want those military augs leaving US soil any more than you do.”

  “This is all good intel,” Vande began, “but we’ll need more before there’s anything actionable. Ideally, we want to net this Sheppard character and his cargo…”

  Miller nodded again. “Agreed. And as much as I’d like to be there with you on this, I’ve got fires to put out here in Prague. But there’s one other piece of the puzzle we got from our intercept that you’re going to find real helpful. We know where Sheppard and his crew are heading, and my guess is, that’s where the exchange will go down.”

  Jarreau felt a tingle of anticipation. This could be the strongest lead they’d had in months. “Let’s hear it.”

  “You ever been to Detroit?” asked Miller, with a wan smile.

  SARIF INDUSTRIES – DETROIT – UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  The twin pillars of the building rose up into the midnight sky before them, and Jensen traced the shapes of the towers, black and dead against the rain that was falling. For a brief moment, it was like looking up at a giant grave marker, and the harshness of the mental image made him grimace. For all the light that David Sarif’s self-styled ‘beacon’ had cast over the streets of Detroit, it would always be cemented in Jensen’s mind as a place that had changed his life in darker ways than he would have wished.

  Pritchard nodded toward the main entrance from beneath his hoodie. “Can’t get in that way,” he said. The first two floors of the building were surrounded by a fence topped with barbed wire, the windows blacked out by metal security grilles retrofitted to the walls. Dim lights moved around behind the panels, back and forth in regular patterns.

  “Guards in there?” asked Stacks. His breathing was labored, but he was keeping up.

  “Not human ones,” Pritchard explained. “Follow me.
There’s another route inside.”

  The streets were deserted here. Aside from the metallic rumble of the occasional passing people mover overhead, there was no-one around to see the three of them pick their way toward the locked entrance to the SI building’s underground car park.

  A massive metal shutter sealed it off from the street level, but one corner of the panel had been dented and stove in. Jensen saw the hulk of a burned-out Motokun cargo truck nearby.

  “Some people tried to break in the hard way,” said Pritchard, off his look. “They didn’t get very far.”

  Rounding the front of the dead truck, Jensen saw that the grille and the windshield were a mess of bullet holes. Whatever weapon had done the damage was large-caliber and fully automatic. “Cops just let that happen?” he asked.

  “They pulled out of the local police precinct after the riots,” said the hacker. “These days, the law doesn’t come down to this part of the city unless it’s in an APC or a gunship.”

  “So, who did that?” Stacks pointed at the truck.

  Pritchard jerked a thumb at the barrier. “The new owners.”

  On the drop-gate there was a warning sign in Chinese, English and Spanish which made short work of explaining that this site now belonged to Tai Yong Medical Incorporated, and that intruders would face lethal force.

  The hacker crouched low and peered into the gap between the floor and the bent door. “A little help?” He looked pointedly at Stacks.

  The other man blew out a breath, and with a grunt of exertion, he pulled the bent corner of the door up a little more, enough so Pritchard could squeeze through. Jensen went after him, and Stack followed, shouldering awkwardly through the gap.

  Inside, the parking garage was murky and the air held the lingering stink of burned plastics and battery acid. The smart-vision system in Jensen’s cyberoptics immediately adjusted for the low-light level, and he watched Pritchard advance gingerly across the concrete cavern. Keeping pace, the three men moved as silently as possible from one support pillar to another. In the far corner of the garage, Jensen saw a blinking crimson light on the exit door leading to the stairwell.

  Pritchard had explained his intrusion plan on the way from the Rialto, and Jensen didn’t like it. While the hacker made his way to the door to disarm the alarm module in place there – along with the fragmentation mine it would trigger if set off – Jensen’s task would be to keep watch for the garage’s guardian. He’d already told Stacks to stick with Pritchard, framing it like he wanted the ex-steeplejack to protect the hacker, but more truthfully it was to keep him out of harm’s way. Stacks wasn’t a fighter, he didn’t have the instinct for it, and Jensen was afraid he would get the man killed.

  They split apart, and Jensen drew his CA-4, flicking off the safety catch. He pulled back the slide to be sure a round was already in the chamber; there it was, the tip of the bullet glowing with a faint blue halo. The modified rounds were a gift from Pritchard, and instead of a lead head or a hollowpoint, they had a tiny pack of conductive gel and a super-dense capacitor at the tip. On impact, the shots released a small, focused electromagnetic pulse, supposedly powerful enough to give any electronic hardware a headache. If they didn’t work as advertised, he wouldn’t be around to complain about it.

  Stalking around abandoned, dust-covered cars, Jensen moved deeper into the dimness. Off to his right, he heard the rattle and click of tools as Pritchard got to work on disarming the lock.

  He stepped past a support pillar and his gaze fell on the perfect, straight edges of a giant cube measuring five meters along each axis. In the shadows, it was black and featureless, but as he watched the surface of the cube trembled. Jensen caught the sound of a muffled curse from the direction of Pritchard and Stacks.

  The cube gave off a hydraulic sigh. Then with a flurry of motion, the sides of it folded up and away like some complex puzzle toy. The dormant Box-Guard robot, likely awakened by the hacker’s actions, was stirring.

  Legs emerged from each corner, along with gun clusters and an articulated neck that ended in a rectangular, cyclopean head. Pin-lamps snapped on, flooding the garage with sodium-bright light – and found Jensen standing before it.

  The Box-Guard hesitated a split-second, still getting its bearings as it rebooted, and that was the vital window of action Jensen needed. Aiming the semi-automatic at the robot’s head, he put a shot right into its sensor grid. Bright sparks flared, but all that seemed to do was narrow the machine’s focus. Its legs stomped as it turned in place to give Jensen its full attention. He heard the whine of servos as the gun pods spun up to power.

  “Shit!” He stood his ground long enough to fire a few more shots, but the EMP rounds seemed to do little to slow it.

  The Box-Guard made a grinding sound and advanced on him, picking up speed with each stride. Jensen broke into a sprint as it came after him, swerving aside as one of the robot’s legs kicked away a Navig subcompact, rolling the car on to its roof. The guns tracked him, swinging back and forth as they coughed out shotgun rounds, but Jensen dodged and wove between the parked vehicles, making it hard for the machine to target him. Belatedly, a recorded message began to play, a soothing female voice speaking in Chinese delivering some kind of demand for a surrender.

  When the robot stumbled into a pillar, Jensen realized that the EMP rounds had made some difference, just not enough to deal with the machine outright. Its motions were becoming sluggish and drunken.

  He took a breath of dusty air and circled back around a sedan, before launching himself right at the Box-Guard. If he could just place his shots in the right spot…

  The robot slammed a leg into the concrete floor with enough force to knock him off-balance and his first round went wide. He fired another, clipping the side of the Box-Guard’s menacing head, and that seemed to agitate the machine. If it was having difficulty targeting him with its guns, then the robot’s programming told it to use a more direct, more kinetic approach instead.

  Rearing up, the Box-Guard raised one leg and calculated the exact amount of hydraulic pressure to crush a human body. It loomed over Jensen, clipping its frame on a dangling light strip.

  He fired, unloading every bullet remaining in the CA-4’s magazine, marching each flashing hit toward a gap in the plating beneath the Box-Guard’s head, where its flexible neck connected. Jolts of sparks vomited out from behind its single eye-lens, and the leg descended with a juddering clank, stopping just short of grinding Jensen into the dust. He rolled away as the machine repeated the action over and over, never quite completing it, stuck in some kind of loop.

  “Jensen!” Pritchard’s nasal shout echoed across the garage. “Quick, get over here before it resets! The door’s clear!”

  He sprinted over, mantling the hoods of parked cars. Pritchard held on to an inert mine template draped with dozens of connector wires, while Stacks shouldered open the door, revealing the stairwell beyond. “Gotta go, gotta go!”

  “Don’t wait for me.” An idea flashed through Jensen’s mind and he snatched the explosive device out of Pritchard’s hands, reactivating it as he raced back the way he had come. He ignored their calls to follow, pausing long enough to toss the frag mine under the shuddering Box-Guard before doubling back once again.

  Jensen was at the door, wrenching it closed behind him when the robot finally snapped itself out of its temporary malaise – and stamped down, right on top of the mine template. The explosive detonated with a flat, loud crack and the Box-Guard toppled.

  “So much for the quiet approach,” snapped Pritchard.

  Jensen shot him a cold look, and started up the stairs toward the upper level. “Next time, have a better plan.”

  * * *

  They emerged through a service door and into the main atrium of the SI building. What hit Jensen first was the smell of stale smoke, an acrid stink that lay heavy in the air all around them. Across the reception area, where once there had been illuminated video-pillars showcasing the achievements of Sarif Indust
ries, there was only a mess of half-dismantled machinery and piles of broken office furniture. Along the walls near the sealed main door there was a wide black stain that reached up to the second level of the atrium. The slick of old soot and melted plastic was like a great burn wound.

  “Firebombs,” Pritchard said quietly, by way of explanation. “Courtesy of the good people of Detroit. Never mind that the company had nothing to do with the incident.” He shook his head. “Idiots. Like trying to burn down a hospital just because someone gets sick.”

  “P-people get afraid, they need someone to blame…” muttered Stacks. “Ain’t no-one’s fuh-fault.”

  Jensen saw splashes of paint over the doors and angry scrawls over the glass – slogans like AUGS OUT and DIE HANZERS! left behind in the aftermath.

  He looked away as movement caught his eye. Set out across the atrium, there were stubby, drum-shaped sensor pods endlessly scanning the area with laser rangers. Each had a multi-barreled gun atop them, and they were actively tracking back and forth. The Box-Guard in the parking garage would have sent a warning to all the units on the security network, upping their alert status to full. Above, on the second and third levels, Jensen saw small, wheeled robots wandering in pre-programmed patrol loops, the same kind of armed sentry that had threatened him outside the Chiron Building apartments.

  “Typical Tai Yong…” Pritchard crouched in the lee of what used to be the reception desk. “Too cheap to bring in any real security.”

  “You forgetting that mech downstairs?” said Jensen.

  Pritchard ignored him. “They’re using SI’s own robots, they just reprogrammed them for deterrent duty.” He tugged on a zip at his cuff that opened the sleeve of his coat along the length of his forearm, revealing a flexible keyboard and monitor screen clipped to the inside of his wrist. The hacker went to work, his other hand dancing across the panel. “Their protocols are always sloppy. Hengsha’s never produced a single decent black hat…”