Deus Ex: Black Light (32 page)

Two-front attack. They’re splitting our focus.
It was an assault tactic right out of any counter-siege operations manual – and with that thought, Jensen suddenly realized what would come next. He surged forward, reaching out to pull Vande to her feet and away. “Get back from there!”

A trio of black-and-yellow cylinders little larger than a man’s fist came spinning into the cargo wagon through the blown-out window, and clattered across the deck. Ingrained reaction made Jensen turn his face away, shouting wordlessly to equalize the pressure inside his body as the concussive charges went off in rapid succession.

* * *

He lost long, precious seconds to the shock effect, struggling to pull back from the sickening disorientation that washed over him. The flash suppressor lenses in Jensen’s optic implants kept him from being blinded, but there was little he could do about the deafening whine from the stun blasts.

That he and Vande were alive was the only luck they had. Thorne’s killers could have tossed fragmentation grenades in after the shaped charge and turned them both into bloody rags, but clearly the intruders were not willing to risk any damage to the cargo.

Jensen stumbled, trying to shake off the stark jolt of sound and light, and grabbed Vande, hauling her up from where she had fallen. The TF29 agent was blinking, reeling, and two streams of blood trickled from her nostrils where the overpressure had hit her hard. She lurched into Jensen, unsteady on the continually oscillating deck of the moving train. He caught an expression of surprise as Vande’s gaze raked over his shoulder and behind him. She called out his name as a warning, but he only saw her mouth the word, his ears still ringing.

The laser burner had done its job and the hatch was grinding open in fits and starts. Jensen fumbled for his gun as the monstrous black shadow he had glimpsed outside the train car now filled the hatchway.

The big cyborg was a full-frame design, the class of augmented human that was known in military and law enforcement circles as an ‘ogre.’ Like the mythological beast they were named after, ogres were strong, tough-skinned and very hard to put down. Outside of national armed forces and certain sanctioned corporate military contractors, an ogre’s very existence was illegal. The United Nations classed them not as people, but as lethal weapons.

In it came, carelessly ripping through the frame of the hatch. Jensen missed the chance to fire off a burst from the Hurricane, but by the looks of the multiple entry wounds across the big aug’s torso, anything smaller than a heavy-caliber bullet wasn’t likely to do more than piss this guy off.

Jensen had been up against this kind of enemy before, but not in such close quarters, and not with another combatant in the kill box. He saw the hint of an icy sneer on the face of the intruder, and then a hammer blow came down, the force of it separating him from Vande with a single swipe. Jensen hit the deck and collided with a rack of storage crates, the painful ringing in his head gaining a fresh chorus of tolling bells. He glimpsed other black-suited attackers following the big cyborg into the compartment.

Vande tried again to get to her feet of her own accord, but the ogre put her down with an off-hand shove that threw the woman into a heap next to Jensen. Somewhere along the way, she had lost her twinned pistols, and Jensen saw his Hurricane lying just out of reach. Any thought he might have had of diving for it faded when one of the other intruders picked it up and pitched the gun away through the ruined window.

The lithe figure in black pulled back a form-fitting hood and a rush of henna-red hair tumbled out, framing a pale, unpleasantly memorable face. “I’m sorry I made you wait, Mr. Jensen,” said Thorne, her voice rendered dull and flat as the tinnitus effect began to wane. “But we caught up again eventually.”

“Long way from Alaska,” he managed. “Not far enough for me.”

“It would be a lie to say your appearance here is a surprise,” Thorne went on. “You have the singular ability to turn up exactly where you are most unwanted.” She frowned, as if considering something. “Perhaps that is what interests them about you.”

“Who would that be?” Jensen came up, dragging himself to a standing position.

Thorne ignored his question, turning to another member of the black ops team – a man with sculpted blades that replaced his lower legs – and pointed toward the panel that Chen had reprogrammed minutes earlier. “Can you take control of the train’s systems from there?”

The other operative nodded. “It’s only military encryption. I’ll take ownership of the network and then I can release the sealed hatches and cargo locks, re-task the locomotive…”

“I didn’t ask for a commentary,” Thorne spoke over him. “Do your job.” The hacker set to work, and she turned back to the cyborg. “Interpol will have reinforcements here in less than fifteen minutes. We need to be ready to take their VTOL when they arrive. Terminate the crew, but we must have the aircraft intact, are we clear?” The ogre acknowledged the order with a solemn nod, but said nothing.

“Huh.” Jensen gave a dry chuckle. “That’s how you’re getting the augs away, on TF29’s own VTOL. Smart. Because you knew they’d come running the moment the guard team on the train went off the air.”

“It is an efficient use of available resources,” Thorne replied. Behind her, the other operative did something with the panel and a tone sounded as the crate latches released in sequence. She nodded at that, and spared Jensen a withering look. “You, however… I consider surplus to requirements.” She raised her gun and aimed it at a point directly between his eyes.

“Those were not the orders.” The ogre broke his silence, a hard Germanic accent coloring his tone. “You are exceeding your authority.”

“It seems like a lot of people don’t like you.” Vande eyed Jensen and took a shuddering breath. “They want… you alive? Or some maybe not so much…”

“Hell if I know,” Jensen snarled, his anger rising sharply. “Shoot me or don’t, Thorne. I’m through playing by the Illuminati’s rules!” He tensed, ready for whatever would come next.
I’m not going down without taking these creeps with me.

Thorne didn’t seem to be listening to any of them. She went on, speaking as if she were voicing her thoughts aloud. “The questions persist. What makes Adam Jensen different from the others who were fished out of the Arctic Ocean on that day? Why was he there? Who sent him?” Her dark eyes narrowed. “Think, Jensen. Ask yourself, what
really
drove you? What was the true, undeniable reason you went to Panchaea?” Thorne pulled back the hammer on her pistol, measuring out the moment. “And why didn’t you drown out there?”

There was hate in the words, and he couldn’t fathom why. Had there been some fragment of his memory that he had lost after the incident, something that Thorne was part of? Or had she known something about him all along, just as he had suspected on their first meeting? Some secret truth that even he wasn’t aware of?

“You tell me,” he said.

“You’ll never know,” said Thorne, with calculated cruelty and the briefest hint of a smile playing on her bloodless lips. Her finger tightened on the trigger.

“She talks too much,” Vande spat, and with a sudden blur of movement, the Task Force agent sprang off her heels.

The next few moments happened so fast, they were barely distinct events, each threading into the other; Vande barreled straight into Thorne, landing a hard cross on the woman that sent her spinning, the big cyborg snatching at her and missing; Thorne struck out with her gun and the revolver went off with a crashing discharge; Vande tumbled away, colliding with Jensen as he moved to grab her.

Blood grew in a great bloom across Vande’s belly, but she was showing her teeth in a savage grin. In her hand, she held the flat, slab-like shape of a Pulsar electromag grenade, torn from Thorne’s belt as the two women had briefly exchanged blows. She mashed down on the trigger pad and hurled it at the feet of the ogre.

Jensen acted on instinct, curling an arm beneath Vande’s and dragging her back and away toward the rear of the train car. He heard the EMP grenade detonate on an impact fuse, felt the buzzing crackle at the edge of the pulse flash as they threw themselves away from the area of effect. His vision blurred like a poorly tuned video signal, but the moment was fleeting as they stumbled out of range and through the hatch at the forward end of the carriage.

* * *

He let Vande fall, ignoring her cry of pain as she went down, and he bodily dragged the open hatch shut behind them. The magnetic locking mechanism thudded home, but he knew it would be no barrier to Thorne and her team now that their hacker had access to the train’s systems.

He went for the brute force option. Jensen deployed a blade from his right arm and slashed open the lock control pad in a shower of sparks. Without pausing, he reached up and cut off the head of the security camera over the doorway, blinding it.

“I… am…” Vande forced out the words. “Surrounded… by fucking idiots.” He looked back at her and saw the Task Force agent clutching at her gut, her gloved hands wet with her own blood. “So much so… I’ve caught
stupidity
off them.” She glared up at him. “Why else would I have done something like that? Tell me!”

“You saved my life,” he said simply.

“Was it worth it?” Vande spat back. She caught sight of the bodies of the rest of her team, the ones in the forward car who had been the first to be executed. “Shit.
Verdomme
shit. Seth’s gone, he was the last one… This is a stinking mess, Jensen.”

“I’ll get you out of here,” he insisted, pointing to the roof of the train car. “There’s a skylight up there, I’ll signal the pilot who brought me in—”

“
I told you no
!” she thundered. “Americans, you always think you know the only way to do things…
No
!” Vande pulled herself into a sitting position, and fumbled for a tiny .454 derringer pistol concealed in an ankle holster. “Listen to me,” she insisted. “Those bastards do not get this train, understand?
They do not
.” Her eyes lost focus for a second, and Jensen knew she was looking at something projected on to her retinal heads-up display. “This train will cross… cross the state line in about eight minutes, and when it does, there’s a curve… It will slow down.” She shook her head. “Speed it up.
Faster
.”

He nodded as he realized what Vande was asking him to do. “The train takes the turn too fast and it’ll go off the rails. Be torn apart.”

“And all that tech they want so… so badly will go up in flames,” she said with venom, glaring at the hatch they had come through. “Go do it. Manual override is in the engine’s cab.” Jensen opened his mouth to protest, but she swore at him again, her expression hostile. “Please don’t give me… some mawkish speech now. Don’t pretend we are friends just because the same bunch of assholes shot at us…”

“You want to die here?” he snarled.

“
No
!” she shouted back at him, slumped against the wall, clutching the derringer like it was a talisman. “But who says I get a vote?” Vande shook her head. “So get up there and
kill this fucking train
!”

* * *

“They’ve destroyed the door controls on the other side.” Thorne’s hacker scowled at the portable monitor mounted on his armored wrist-guard. “I’ll get the laser, we’ll just cut through again.”

“Do it. And in the meantime…” she said, with a sniff. Thorne looked across to the cyborg. “
You
. Do what you are best at. Find Jensen and the woman, kill them both. That’s a direct order.”

“It is contrary to what we were told—” began the cyborg, but Thorne silenced him with a savage throat-cutting gesture.

“Are you going to disobey me?” she said, as hard and cold as ice.

“No,” he replied, after a moment. The dead-eyed expression on his face never shifted. “But you will be held responsible.” He walked away, flexing his thick fingers experimentally.

“How do you expect him to get through there?” said the other operative.

“By the direct route.”

The hulking cyborg approached the torn-open hatchway at the rear of the cargo wagon and reached up, hands clutching at broken fragments of metal. With a grind of pistons, he hauled himself off the deck and on to the roof of the speeding train.

* * *

The locomotive’s cab was a sparse affair, a repeater console mounted in one corner of the compartment next to a tall server module behind steel access plates. The module controlled the train, sensing the motion and mass of the wagons behind it, managing their speed in real time as it sped down the rails at breakneck pace. On a display screen mounted beneath an armored window slit, a digital display showed a dozen virtual gauges and above them a rolling map. On the latter, the railroad ahead was visible as a narrow line growing into a steep curve that was coming closer by the minute.

Jensen looked around and found a set of emergency manual controls, a redundant system placed there in the rare event that a human driver would need to take over. The manual system was locked beneath a thick plastic shield that resisted his attempts to lever it open. Instead, he cracked it with the butt of an FR-27 flechette rifle he had found on the deck in the crew car, and the plastic fractured. In a few moments he had the controls exposed. There was a dead man’s switch, a speed governor, and a bunch of other dials and switches that he didn’t recognize.

He rammed the throttle bar forward to the highest setting and felt the train lurch as the engine put on a burst of acceleration. Red alert lights flashed, warning him to ease off on the power, but Jensen ignored them. He would have to jam the controls so the speed could not be reduced.

If in doubt
, he told himself,
break it.
Jensen found the manual switches for the emergency brakes and fired a burst of rounds into the panel. More alarms sounded as he turned back to the main controls, ready to repeat the action.

But then the sliding hatch on the side of the cab squealed open on poorly oiled runners and a huge arm made of steel and corpse-pale flesh came through the gap, grabbing at him. The thunderous, constant bellow of the engine filled the compartment on a gale of damp air as Thorne’s pet cyborg squeezed in through the narrow hatchway. Arms swinging wildly, the ogre connected with Jensen’s shoulder and even the glancing blow was enough to make the motors in his cyberlimb stutter.