Deus Ex: Black Light

by James Swallow

  The Task Force aircraft had got past that hurdle by using some kind of electroactive pigment on the fuselage, which shifted the VTOL’s usual matte black coloration to the nondescript yellow and white livery of an XNG Shipping transport. Parked out on the edge of the airport apron, they were down as close as they dared get to the hangar where the MCBs were congregating.

  “Move out,” hissed Jarreau, and the squad broke into two groups, each slipping across the runway in the pools of darkness between the landing lights. Jensen kept in step with the team he’d been reluctantly assigned to. Leading from the front, Vande made a habit of checking to make sure he was still following them every minute or so.

  Vande’s group gathered in the shadow of some parked service vehicles, surveying the hangar from the western approach. There were no lookouts Jensen could see, but every entrance to that side of the building was padlocked shut.

  “We go loud on the doors, that’s two, maybe four seconds we lose,” said one of the other operatives. “Not good.”

  Vande nodded, unhappy with the evaluation. “We’ll have to cryo the locks before we breach.” She picked out two of the team and pointed toward the doors. Jensen watched them scuttle across and set to work with small liquid nitrogen aerosols on the door mechanisms.

  “Copy,” Vande said quietly, reacting to something unheard that Jarreau had transmitted over her infolink. As well as forcing Jensen to wear the inhibitor and denying him a gun, the Task Force had also cut him out of the communications loop.

  “Hey.” The operative who had spoken before nudged Jensen with his elbow and placed a lowlight scope in his hand. “By the main doors. See them?”

  Jensen raised the monocular to his eye and saw two figures standing outside the hangar. He glimpsed a flash of gold-plated teeth and eyes like bright coins. “Yeah, I got it. One on the left, that’s Magnet, leader of the MCBs. If he’s here, he’s brought his troops.”

  Vande cocked her head. “One, this is Two. Observer confirms, Target Bravo is on site.” She listened to something, then nodded to herself. “Roger that. Go on your signal.”

  The sound of engines reached Jensen’s ears and he glanced up the runway. A large, smooth-sided form was rolling toward the hangar, strobing lights spilling from its flanks. Slowly, the hangar doors began to roll open.

  * * *

  The ‘manta ray’ Magnet had glimpsed earlier was more like some kind of whale when seen close up. The hull of the cargo jet was a blended shape, the thick wings tapering out of a bloated body that sprouted tail fins and a pair of massive ducted engines, which continued to spin and idle as the craft pivoted and backed halfway into the hangar.

  He couldn’t see a cockpit. The front of the plane was flat and featureless except for all kinds of chunky antennae that gave it a whiskered look. But someone had to be in there, he reckoned. This load was too important to be left to machines to handle.

  There was a clatter of metal on metal, and spindly latches along the belly of the cargo plane snapped open and unfolded. With a low whine of hydraulics, an entire mid-section of the jet detached and sagged on to a vacant jack rig with a dull boom. The robot jack rolled it away, and Magnet saw that the disconnected unit was exactly the same dimensions as the waiting container his boys had filled.

  He couldn’t resist taking a look inside the plane, and Magnet swaggered across the hangar to peer into the opened fuselage. Three mercs armed with flechette rifles and cold gazes stared back out at him, their guns at the ready. One of them saw the gang leader and hoisted his rifle with a shit-eating grin. “Well, howdy,” he offered. “Who the hell might you be?”

  “Could ask you the same, man,” Magnet sniffed. “You working for her too, huh?”

  The merc shook his head. “Nah. We’re more like… independent contractors, you feel me?”

  “Sheppard,” said one of the other men. “We here to load up or we here to chat? Come on, man, tick-tock.”

  “Fair point,” said the merc, and looked back toward Magnet. “You got something for us, bro?”

  “Whatever,” said the ganger, and he stepped away, throwing a loose wave at his men. One of them hit a switch, and the self-seeking jack shifted the full container into the space vacated by the old one.

  * * *

  Jensen used the monocular to sweep the area, but there was no sign of any other faces he recognized. He’d expected Don Wilder to be here for the close out, but the ex-security guard was conspicuous by his absence. That made him a loose end that would need to be tied off – if Jensen got the opportunity. It was equally likely that someone else had already done that job for him.

  He still wasn’t a hundred percent sold on Jarreau’s story about Task Force 29 and what they were here for, but for now their goals aligned and that was all Jensen could be certain of.

  Vande spoke quietly, relaying new orders. “Surveillance confirms we have detected a positive voice trace for Target Alpha. Repeat, Target Alpha is on site. This is a green light.”

  Bravo was Magnet, listed by Interpol as a second-tier objective and a ‘warrant of opportunity,’ but Alpha was the mercenary smuggler known as Sheppard, a prime scalp that Jarreau’s unit were itching to take. Jensen felt the tension crackle in the air as the two teams stiffened like runners on the starting blocks.

  Vande looked at the operative who had spoken earlier. “You. Hold here, watch him.” She pointed at Jensen. “He doesn’t move from this spot, copy?”

  “Copy,” said the other man.

  “I can help,” Jensen told her.

  “I don’t care.” Vande made a striking motion with the blade of her hand, and as one the rest of her team burst into motion, loping toward the hangar. He watched them vanish inside.

  A few seconds later, Jensen heard the chug of a suppressed weapon – and then from out of nowhere came the metallic screaming of a heavy-caliber autocannon, the vicious thudding crack of anti-material rounds blasting everything in sight.

  He saw the sudden flash of ragged holes appearing in the thin walls of the hangar building as wildfire bullets sliced through them and hummed through the air around them. Jensen dove to the asphalt behind the wheel well of a runway tug, but his guardian wasn’t quick enough. Heavy rounds designed to tear open armored vehicles cut into the luckless operative in gouts of bright blood, and he crashed to the ground.

  Inside the hangar, all hell was breaking loose, and above the noise the shriek of engines rose high as the cargo plane began to roll back out on to the runway.

  TEN

  WAYNE COUNTY AIRPORT – DETROIT – UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  Vande followed the point man through the door into the hangar, kicking away the brittle, super-chilled fragments of the lock mechanism where they lay shattered on the ground. The team filed silently into the gloomy interior, directing left and right with jerks of the head and swift, sharp hand gestures.

  She had her twinned semi-automatics out and at the ready, the long suppressors attached, the muzzles doubling the length of the silver pistols. Slipping behind a stack of oil drums, Vande chanced a quick look out across the hangar proper.

  Clamps along the center of the idling jet were in the process of grasping a cargo module, drawing it up and into place beneath the fuselage. In a few moments, the aircraft would be ready to depart, and she guessed that Sheppard’s pilot would be unlikely to wait around for permission from air traffic control if the shooting started. She looked over her shoulder and nodded at the woman coming up behind her. “Lund,” she whispered, “prep the charge.”

  “Copy.” Lund was a muscular Texan woman with bright eyes and an auburn buzz cut, and her primary role was as the squad’s anti-vehicle specialist. She carried a powerful mine template in her backpack with an overcharged EMP unit that had enough jolt to shut down a main battle tank. The plan was to get her close enough to knock out the cargo plane’s electronics before it could escape.

  But even as Lund set the charge’s mechanism, Vande had the creeping, sixth-sense feeling tha
t something was wrong. Long, hard-won field experience and raw gut instinct went a long way, and both were gnawing at her.

  Despite surveillance getting a positive detection of Sheppard’s voiceprint inside the hangar, she saw no sign of the mercenary or any of his crew outside the aircraft. There were only the Detroit gangers, who milled around, on edge with their fingers on their triggers.

  “Go, go, go!” Jarreau’s voice whispered in her ear and Vande launched forward as he spoke the last word, seeing other figures in black emerging from behind cover on the far side of the jet, moving to surround the criminals.

  The gang members reacted with shock and fury, bringing up their guns as one.

  “Police! Drop your weapons!” Vande shouted, instantly aiming at the first two targets in front of her. She let the aiming enhancer in her cyberoptics kick in, allowing it to lock on to both threats at the same time with no loss of accuracy.

  The MCB ganger to her right turned an auto-shotgun her way, his finger tightening on the trigger. “Ah, go fu—”

  Vande cut him off mid-speech with a single round that went through his left eye and blew out the back of his skull.

  “Guns down or you die!” She heard Jarreau bellow the command to anyone who didn’t take Vande’s demonstration to heart, but his voice was drowned out as the cargo jet’s engines began to rev up.

  Lund broke cover and sprinted for the flank of the big aircraft, dragging the EMP with her; she never got there.

  A hatch behind the blunt nose of the jet clanked open and a ring of black gun muzzles emerged – a multi-barreled autocannon, already whining as it spun up to firing speed.

  With a deep, tearing sound like sustained thunder, the cannon opened up on Lund and savagely cut her down. Brilliant streaks of crimson tracer lanced across the hangar’s interior, shredding anything in their path, blasting through the building’s sheet metal walls as if they were paper. The gun’s automatic tracking didn’t differentiate between Task Force members or MCBs – if it was moving, it was a target.

  Other guns opened up in the melee as the gang members fired at every threat around them, and Vande’s colleagues defended themselves in kind. Suddenly the air inside the hangar was thick with cordite and hot metal.

  She hurled herself back into the cover of the oil drums just as the cannon tracked her way, spraying heavy jacketed rounds at her heels that splintered the concrete floor. In just a few seconds, the entire operation had gone off the rails, and there was nothing she could do to stop it.

  The cargo jet rocked forward on its fat wheels and rolled out into the darkness, the thrust from its engines adding a screaming gale to the unfolding chaos.

  * * *

  Jensen dragged the fallen man out of the line of fire, his hands gripping a tac vest that was already soaked through with blood. The Interpol agent was twitching, going into shock as spurts of fluid vented from his horrific wounds. No matter what kind of medical Sentinel implants the man had, he was going to bleed out in moments.

  Ignoring the gunfire and howling engines from across the way, Jensen grabbed for the operative’s first aid pack and emptied out the contents on the tarmac. He grabbed a morphine syrette and shot the drug load into the man’s neck, then tossed it away, in favor of a thick injector bulb filled with a bio-foam compound. In a few seconds, the injector clogged the brutal wounds, buying the man the precious time he would need to survive.

  The agent’s eyes fogged as he looked up at Jensen, before the pain dragged him away into unconsciousness.

  Strobing lights washed over the pair of them and Jensen looked up, seeing the wings of the big cargo hauler sweep around as it pivoted on to the taxiway. The autocannon had fallen silent, but there was still a ferocious firefight in progress inside the hangar. Whatever hornet’s nest the TF29 squads had stepped into, they were caught there.

  Jensen rocked on his heels, still feeling the leaden drag of the inhibitor on his augmentations. He couldn’t try the stun gun trick he used back in Alaska again; instead he went back to the bloodied, unconscious Interpol agent, searching for and finding the same cryo-spray aerosol the man’s teammates had used to break the hangar’s locks. Acting quickly, Jensen pressed the nozzle to the casing of the inhibitor bracelet and let a jet of super-cooled liquid nitrogen coat the metal. He flinched as the pain sensors in his augmented arm went off, knowing that he risked doing serious damage to the myomer muscles beneath the polycarbonate skin – but Vande had neglected to leave behind a key and Jensen had no other options.

  After a moment, Jensen straightened, and struck his arm against the roll bar of a service jeep parked close by. The inhibitor’s power lights went out and it cracked in two. Shaking it off, he felt the surge of fresh input as all his augmentations began to cycle back to full operability. Reboot icons crowded the edge of his vision as the systems reactivated one by one. He shook his head to dismiss them. There wasn’t time for a steady, cautious restart.

  The jet was receding with every passing moment as it headed toward takeoff position at the far end of the runway. On foot he would never catch it in time – and even though Jensen was now making this up as he went along, he followed his first impulse to climb into the parked service jeep and tear open the ignition cylinder. Twisting the ragged ends of the starter wires together, he stamped on the accelerator and the open-topped 4x4 lurched forward into a skidding start. Jensen hauled the jeep around in a turn so tight it almost put it on two wheels, and aimed it away from the hangar toward the retreating lights of the cargo jet.

  * * *

  Magnet was shouting and swearing at the mercs in the plane as they powered away and left the Motor City Bangers to be cut down by the force of so-called cops that had ghosted in from out of nowhere. Emptying his own gun at the men in black, he watched a dozen of his crew take hits that ended them, some from the new arrivals and more from the crazy blind-fire from the big cannon on the jet. That died off when the plane pulled away, but by then the firefight had well and truly erupted, and it wouldn’t end until one side was destroyed.

  But who lived and who died among the MCBs was the last thing on Magnet’s mind in that moment. Right then and there, he didn’t care about any of them, he just wanted someone to vent his towering rage on. He wanted to make someone pay for the double-cross.

  Staggering to the hangar doors, he saw the flash of headlights as a 4x4 revved up and kicked into gear, swerving across the asphalt to follow the jet.

  Behind the wheel was a face that was burned into his memory – that bastard from the warehouse, the one who had tried to take him down on the roof. If there was a more fitting target for Magnet’s anger, he couldn’t think of it.

  The gang leader threw away his empty weapon and broke into a run, his augs powering up as he triggered the illegal modification in his cybernetic arm. Magnet surged forward, reaching out with his gold-plated cyberarm.

  * * *

  Jensen saw movement from the corner of his eye as he hit the runway; then in the next second a human figure collided with the front of the jeep, and he almost lost control of the vehicle.

  Clinging to the hood as they sped away from the hangar, the leader of the MCBs showed Jensen a feral snarl full of gold-plated teeth. His hand was fixed to the metal with buzzing electromagnetic pads on the palm, and belatedly Jensen realized how it was that ‘Magnet’ had become the criminal’s nickname.

  He roared and his other fist came through the windshield, showering Jensen in pieces of glass. “I seen you!” Magnet shouted, dragging himself closer. “You gonna pay for messing with me!”

  Jensen threw the jeep into a quick series of right-left-right swerves that sent them back and forth across the width of the runway, but Magnet wasn’t so easily dislodged. He slid his cybernetic hand off the hood and lurched at Jensen, snagging the frame of the broken windshield, rising up to swing a kick toward the other man’s head.

  Jensen ducked, sensing a familiar tingle in his mastoid bone as his infolink belatedly rebooted. A heartbeat later, an
d he heard a voice echo through his skull.

  “So you’re not dead,” began Pritchard. “Tracking you… at the airport? What’s going on, Jensen, you’ve been offline for hours—”

  “Busy,” Jensen bit out the word as Magnet came at him, silencing the distraction. It was a risk taking one hand off the wheel at this speed, but there was no other way he could defend himself. Magnet landed a punch that lit fireworks behind his eyes and hauled back for a follow-up, but this time Jensen was ready and he blocked the blow by enveloping the gang leader’s flesh-and-blood fist in the artificial fingers of his polycarbonate hand. He gave Magnet’s arm a brutal twist, breaking the other man’s wrist.

  Howling with pain, Magnet threw himself at Jensen in a desperate, wild attack as they closed in on the turning circle at the end of the runway. Up ahead, the cargo jet was coming about to line up for its departure run.

  Jensen punched forward to meet Magnet’s assault, his arm blade extending as he landed the blow. The fractal-edged blade pierced the gang leader’s chest and throat, the shock slamming him back. Jensen stamped on the brakes and Magnet flew off the hood, ripping away the windshield frame still held in his augmented grip.

  The dazzling glow of the cargo jet’s running lights flashed brightly as the aircraft’s engines rose in pitch once more, and with a rush of motion it came hurtling back up the runway toward the jeep. Jensen slammed the vehicle into gear and hauled it around, sliding away to the grassy border strip as the jet thundered past. Lying across the center of the runway, Magnet’s body disappeared under the central wheels of the aircraft and was crushed against the asphalt.

  The jeep roared as Jensen threw it into high gear and raced after the jet. He had only moments to try and match pace with it. Once the cargo plane’s engines were cycled up to full thrust, nothing would stop it from climbing into the air.