Deus Ex: Black Light (15 page)

After a minute or so, it became clear the two MCBs were in no hurry to leave. “
You’re going to have to deal with them
,” noted Pritchard.

“I figured that,” Jensen muttered.

Stacks gave him a sideways look and tapped a metal finger to his temple. “Snakey giving you trouble?”

“
Tell him not to call me that
,” snapped Pritchard.

Jensen nodded. “Stay here. I’ll go take care of the guards.”

Stacks looked doubtful. “Nothing but open ground over there. They’ll see you soon as you step out.”

“I don’t think so.” Jensen stood up and holstered his pistol, before calling up a nerve-impulse pattern to interface with another of his implants. It was energy-hungry and he’d been reluctant to use it until now, but after the scan at SI showed his augs were still in good working order, he was willing to chance it. “Now you see me…”

Jensen trigged his thermoptical camouflage and light bent around him, turning his shape into a shimmering, hollow outline. Stacks jerked back in shock, as if he’d seen a ghost.

“Now you don’t,” concluded Jensen, and slipped away.

* * *

He moved slowly and carefully, making sure he did as little as possible to disrupt the pattern field, aware of the ever-present energy drain on his bio-cell batteries. Each wary step brought him closer to the two MCBs and the muzzles of their machine pistols. If they made him, he’d be cut down before he could react.

“You don’t know a damn thing,” the smoker was telling his compatriot, waving the cigarette in the air between the fingers of a gold-plated cyberarm. “That ain’t how it happened. Folks didn’t go crazy because of no germs, fool. The incident was all down to the gov’ment!”

The other ganger bounced on the balls of his feet, the pistons in his augmetic legs hissing with each motion. “What makes you the one who knows?” His speech was slightly slurred, and Jensen recognized the effects of a zee dose. The artificial neurochemical was a potent street drug that was popular among Detroit’s criminal underclass. The other MCB snapped his mouth open and shut. “Millions of people wind up dead? That ain’t just the government, man. Too big for that.” He shook his head vigorously. “Those coghatin’, natch-lovin’ Purity First assholes did it! Them and that Humanity Front, pretending they’s all decent and shit, but they was in it together, they made a killer virus! Sent everybody loco, is what it did.” He flexed his arms. “Heard it from a guy who used to work at LIMB, man. That’s stone cold truth.”

Jensen crept closer, moving to keep himself out of their fields of view. He was almost in range.

The smoker cleared his throat and spat into the weeds sprouting through the damaged tarmac at his feet. “Nope. Let me tell
you
what’s real. The Man, he want to keep us down ’cos of this!” He curled his metal-clad fingers into a defiant fist. “The Man kisses up to those corporate sons-of-bitches and they mess with the pozy! That’s how they did it, yeah?
Con-tam-in-ate-ed
.” He sounded out the word for extra emphasis. “They knew it was a bad batch, but they still wanted their paper. And now they get to come down hard on all us cogs, pretend like it was our fault!” He spat again. “Hey! You listening to me?”

The other ganger was looking away, staring into nothing. “Reckon I saw something moving, is all.”

“You crazy,” snorted the smoker, taking another long drag.

“He’s really not,” said Jensen, decloaking between the pair of them. Both the MCBs reacted with shouts of alarm and went fumbling for their guns, but neither of them were fast enough to avoid Jensen’s reflex-boosted attack as he struck out and grabbed them by their necks. With a single, lighting-fast move, he yanked them off-balance and cracked their skulls against one another with enough force to knock them both unconscious. He released his grip and let them slump into a heap among the overgrowth.

Stacks burst out of cover and sprinted to his side. “That is some neat trick,” he said. “I know you said back at 451 that you was some kinda cop, but level with me. Is that
all
you is?”

“I’m someone trying to do right,” he told him. “That’s what matters.” Jensen gathered up the machine pistols and ammo clips from the two fallen gangers and Stacks followed him to the sealed doorway.

* * *

The expandable metal barrier blocking the entrance had a magnetic lock holding it closed, and Jensen took a second to consider how he was going to deal with it.

Stacks shook his head and pushed him aside. “Allow me.” The ex-steeplejack reached down, and with a spin of his wrist, he wrenched the lock mechanism out of the frame. “Easy…”

Despite Stacks’s wary grin, Jensen still saw the tremors in his artificial hand. “I need you focused,” he told him. “Okay?”

“No… no problem,” Stacks breathed. “I’m just a little new to this breaking and entering stuff, is all.”

“Stay close and watch my back.” He handed the other man one of the machine pistols. Stacks took it like it was poisonous. “Don’t use it unless you have to.”

“You can… count on that.”

Jensen put his shoulder to the barrier and forced it open. Passing through, they emerged on a raised platform above a sunken loading bay. It ran the full length of the building, vanishing into darkness and shadows. But a few hundred meters away, there was a knot of activity illuminated by the lights Stacks had seen from the rooftops.

“Tread careful,” Jensen whispered, and then set off in a crouched walk, panning his gaze from side to side. The smart vision implant in his skull parsed the environment around him, projecting a sensor grid overlay on to his optical display, highlighting movement and potential targets. There were a lot of gangers down there, some of them milling around with weapons at the ready, others working in a ragged line as they carried plastic containers out from deeper in the warehouse annex.

Jensen halted in the lee of a support pillar and watched as two men hefted a long box into the back of a six-wheeler cargo truck. The familiar stylized seraph’s wing logo of Sarif Industries was visible on the side of the crate.

“
Ishtar-model leg augmentations
,” said Pritchard; for a moment, Jensen had forgotten that the hacker was seeing more or less exactly what he did. “
At least, that’s what the barcode on the box says. In reality, it could be anything in there.
”

“That’s not mech limbs,” said Jensen, as he caught sight of another MCB ganger approaching, pushing a wheeled barrow with an open crate atop it. He saw the recognizable honeycomb pattern of Typhoon modules inside, wrapped in plastic packing sheets. Distributed around the torso and limbs of an implantee, they could project a series of directed-blast explosive spheres, effectively turning the user into a human cluster bomb.

Another ganger stepped in the way and Jensen saw a face he knew – the one called Cali, who had tried to shake down Pritchard for protection. “There’s your buddy with the attitude problem,” he said quietly, watching as a bull-necked man wearing a reversed baseball cap came striding over to interrupt Cali’s conversation.

“This guy looks like… like he’s in charge,” muttered Stacks from nearby.

Jensen nodded in agreement. The new arrival had implanted eye shields, gold mirrors that were thick and round like antique coins. He sneered as he spoke harshly to Cali, revealing more gold worked into his teeth. One arm was artificial, plated with a fake skin-tone sheath and lines of white chaser lights beneath the polymer epidermis. The rest of the MCBs gave him a respectful berth as he jabbed a finger at the air. In his other hand he was holding a digital tablet.

“
Magnet
,” said Pritchard. “
The top dog of the Motor City Bangers, in the very unpleasant flesh
.”

As he watched, Jensen saw Magnet aim a kick at the wheels of the barrow and he caught a snatch of swearing as the gang leader berated the younger member. The MCB pushing the barrow left it behind and sprinted back off into the storage racks, while Magnet turned his attention fully on Cali. He pointed at some of the crates and shook his head, instead jabbing his finger at others that hadn’t yet been loaded.

“He’s got himself a shopping list,” Jensen thought aloud.

“
That’s not all
,” added Pritchard. “
I’m reading another encrypted signal in your area, tagged on an infolink channel. Someone is speaking to Magnet directly through a mastoid com implant, just as I’m talking to you
.”

That confirmed the suspicion that had been forming in Jensen’s thoughts since the start. While the MCBs clearly had ambition beyond their station as just a street gang, it didn’t track that a group like them would be players in the theft and sale of prohibited human augmentation technology. “Whoever is on the other end of that infolink conversation is the one holding Magnet’s leash,” he said. “Pritchard, can you back-trace the signal, find out where it’s coming from?”

The hacker’s reply was predictably terse. “
What do you think I’m doing?
”

“Hey,” whispered Stacks. “A lot of trouble waitin’ to happen down there, Jensen.” His tone began to rise, taking on a fearful edge. “You mind telling me how we’re gonna puh-put all this hardware outta action, without getting lead-lined?
Huh
?”

“Keep it together,” Jensen said firmly. “There’s a way. But it’s a little showier than what I’d hoped for…” He paused, scanning the warehouse. The scavenger had been right, there
was
an army of them down there. Far too many for two men to take on directly. “Pritchard, check the blueprints. I need you to find me an access shaft down to the sub-basement. The main utilities conduit.”

“
Working on it…
” A moment later, an icon blinked into existence on Jensen’s retinal display. “
Waypoint uploaded. That’ll take you to it.
” He paused. “
I see what’s down there, so I think I know what you’re planning. And it’s idiotic.
”

“Didn’t ask your opinion,” he retorted.

“What?” Stacks shot him a nervous look.

“Follow me,” Jensen told the other man. “I’m gonna need that muscle of yours.”

* * *

In the end, it took both of them to force open the doors to the service shaft that dropped down into the darkness. Jensen pushed through the gap and found a ladder that allowed him to descend quickly and quietly. Stacks followed, grimly moving down one rung at a time, hand over hand.

There was little light, but his smart vision mode got past that problem, the Eye-Know optics rendering the area in a grid of geometric shapes that he could navigate easily. He glanced over his shoulder. “Still with me?”

“I gotta choice?” grumbled Stacks. He followed as Jensen moved on, but he was flinching at every echo of noise from above them, every knock and thud of the pipes that lined the sub-basement floor.

Jensen quickly found what he was looking for. Set into the pipes were a series of smaller branching conduits and a regulator mechanism studded with valves. He tested one experimentally. The wheel atop the valve moved a fraction and then stuck.

“I need you to throw this open,” he told Stacks. “All the way. Can you do that?”

The other man peered through the dimness at the regulator, seeing the warning plate bolted to the pipe that specifically said
not
to do what Jensen was asking. “Are you c-crazy? This here’s a gas main. If there’s anything still flowing through it—”

“There is.” Jensen cut him off, tapping on an old-style gauge that had a needle gently twitching in the lower ranges of its dial. “Not full on, but enough.”

“Oh, man.” Stacks raised his hands to his face, clasping it between his spindly augmented fingers. “You wanna cause a leak, blow this place to hell? How you gonna do that?”

Jensen reached into a pocket on his tactical vest and produced a flexible rectangular pack filled with a blue gel. “This is a remote-detonated explosive. We plant it, get the hell out and then…” He spread his hands.

“That’ll bring the whole building down on the heads of those idiots upstairs.”

Jensen nodded. “That’s the idea.”

Stacks’s hands were trembling, so he knotted them together. “And you’re okay with that?”

Jensen’s jaw hardened. “You want to go up there and ask them real nice to put those augs back where they found them?” He frowned. “If you’ve got another way to stop them walking out of here with that tech, let’s hear it.”

“I… I guess not.” Stacks gave a doleful nod. “All right then. Step back, let me do it.” Clasping the valve wheel, he gave a deep grunt and turned it. Stacks’s aug arms juddered as he applied more force to the action, and then suddenly the valve failed catastrophically. The wheel snapped off in his hands, taking part of the mechanism with it.

Jensen immediately caught the stink of gas from the fractured pipe, and he tossed the explosive pack down next to it. “Okay, we gotta book, now!”

But they were only a few steps away from the maintenance shaft when voices echoed down to them from the upper floor. Jensen pushed Stacks back to the wall as a flashlight beam stabbed downward, followed by a gob of thick spittle as someone spat down into the gloom and laughed.

“Pritchard, our way out is compromised,” whispered Jensen. “Need an alternative, now.”

“Hey, whatssat down there?” called a voice from above.

As he pulled Stacks away, Pritchard’s voice sounded through Jensen’s bone-induction transceiver. “
According to the building plans, five meters to your right is a crawlway that should take you up to an access channel underneath one of the materials recycling bays.
”

“Copy that.” The acrid taste of the gas was gathering at the back of his throat. “Stacks, this way.”

“I hope you… know what you’re doing, man.” Stacks coughed and fell in step with him.

* * *

Later, Jensen would reflect on the thought that
here
was where everything started to fall apart.

Yanking open the vent concealing the other shaft, he didn’t waste any time climbing up and through. As Jensen ascended back toward ground level, he felt the crawlway shake and creak as Stacks forced his way up behind him. It was a tight fit for both of them, and the other man’s thick cyberlimbs scraped along the inside of the metal walls. He thought he heard Stacks muttering under his breath, like he was talking to someone only he could hear. Pritchard’s warning about stability echoed in Jensen’s thoughts.