Deus Ex: Black Light (16 page)

His shoulder made contact with a gridded metal plate and he forced it up and open, rising with a gasp as he emerged in the gloom of the recycling bay. Jensen gave an involuntary shudder as his lungs filled with cold air. The chamber had a damp, refrigerated chill, and he could hear fluid dripping on to a tiled floor. In the dim light that crept in around double doors at either end of the room, Jensen made out strange rectangular shapes hanging from suspended rails. He brushed one with his hand; it was flexible plastic, with something bulky but supple contained within.

Behind him, Stacks came climbing out of the crawlway, shivering and nervous. “I… I gotta get out of here.”

“No argument there.” Jensen took two steps and heard the dull buzz of a motion sensor as it brought the room’s lighting out of rest mode and up to full brightness. With a sudden shock of bright white, the whole of the recycling bay was revealed around them.

Jensen’s first sense was of a meat locker. Hundreds of meter-long packets dangled all around them, and in each one was a human limb, bathed in an inert liquid sealant. Not organic limbs, of course. The riot of skin colors – from normal human shades to ink-dark and metallic emerald, from candy-apple crimson to zebra stripes – belied their origins. Each packet was marked with a red stamp bearing the Sarif Industries logo, showing that the cybernetics had failed at some critical juncture of testing and been sent down here with intent to be dismantled and recycled.

In that brief moment, Jensen turned back to see the expression on Stacks’s face and he could only imagine the lens of horror through which the other man saw the room.

“Wait!” Jensen reached out for him, desperately trying to forestall any fear-fueled reaction Stacks would have. But he was already too late. It was the moment in the lab all over again, but this time the animal terror in the other’s man’s eyes would not abate so easily.

Stacks cried out in utter shock, swinging his massive machine-arms around, recoiling from the severed limbs hanging all around him. Panicking, he raked and clawed at the grotesque orchard of synthetic legs and arms, his boots splashing across puddles of the milky preservative liquid where it had congealed like watery resin. He began screaming, and the sound rebounded off the tiled walls. It was the bellowing of a man pushed beyond dread into the worst fear he could imagine.

“Why did you bring me here?” he screamed. “Why are you showing me this?”

“I didn’t know!” Jensen went for him, reaching out in a vain attempt to grab the ex-steeplejack, but his heavy rust-red metal limbs knocked him aside, the glancing blow blasting the wind out of his lungs. Each mad sweep of Stacks’s grinding, piston-hissing arms tore down dozens of packets, the useless augs tumbling to the floor and cracking apart.

“
What did you do to me
?” Stacks bellowed. “Why did you make me do this? Who are you?
Who are you
?” He shrieked the words, eyes wide but with no recognition in them. Jensen realized too late that Pritchard had been right; whatever had triggered in Stacks at the Sarif lab had not just been due to his neuropozyne withdrawal. It went far deeper than that. The man was damaged inside, tormented by personal demons that went way beyond anything else.

“Stop!” Jensen shouted back at him, desperate to snap him out of his mania. “Stacks, this isn’t what you think!”

“I couldn’t stop myself! I couldn’t stop couldn’t stop
stop stop STOP
…” Stacks’s cries became thunderous and his metallic fingers raked across his face, drawing runnels of blood as they gouged his cheeks.

Jensen tried again to grab him, and this time a thick steel elbow joint cracked him squarely in the sternum. The impact rattled his teeth in his head and Jensen tasted blood as he stumbled back, barely keeping his footing.

Then there were shouts from the corridor beyond the chamber, and the heavy doors crashed open as three MCB gangers burst in, each one brandishing a weapon.

Stacks wheeled around and howled, spittle foaming on his lips, his claw-hands snapping at nothing.

The gang members did not hesitate. Their guns barked and Jensen instinctively threw himself to the ground as a salvo of shotgun blasts and 10mm rounds ripped through the air, carving into the other man. Stacks lurched forward, blood jetting from his wounds, and crushed the head of the nearest MCB between the fingers of one mechanical hand. Another he sent careening into a wall with a vicious backhand blow, before the pain signals from his body finally reached his brain and he crashed to the ground.

The third ganger broke out of his shock at the sudden violence of Stacks’s assault, and raised his shotgun toward the fallen man’s head – but Jensen made sure he never pulled the trigger. Leaping up from where he had fallen, he extended his arm-blade as he moved and ran the MCB through with the blunt tip. As the ganger fell, Jensen stumbled toward his fellow fugitive.

Stacks stared into nothing, trembling with shock. Each breath from his mouth came in a wet, rattling gasp and his clothes were awash with blood. Even with the protective vest Pritchard had found for him, Stacks had been shot at so close a range that the Kevlar weave could not stop the hollowpoint rounds and solid slugs from tearing him apart.

“Ah hell…” Jensen reached for him. “Stacks, no…”

“I’m… killed.” He forced out the words with a low gurgle of blood. His eyes found Jensen, tried to focus. “How… did this happen to us, brother?” He shook, racked with agonized sobs. “Look what… they did!”

“
Good grief…
” Over the infolink, Pritchard made a retching sound as the portable camera on Jensen’s webbing caught sight of the damage to the man.

Out in the corridor, he could hear the rush of more footsteps as other MCBs were drawn by the crash of gunfire. He pulled up the Hurricane machine pistol, aiming it toward the open door.

Jensen’s throat tightened as he searched for something to say, some platitude to ease the horrible moment, but there was nothing that didn’t seem empty or trite. In his time as a beat cop, Jensen had seen more than his share of gunshot victims, and he didn’t need a paramedic to tell him that Harrison Stacker would be dead in minutes, if not less.

“I’m sorry.” The words came from nowhere. Stacks nodded at him; it seemed to be enough.

A blood-flecked, clawed hand clasped Jensen’s shoulder. “You were right back there, in the lab,” he wheezed. “We can’t be animals. We have to be better… but I couldn’t stop. Couldn’t stop myself, Adam. Oh, god forgive me, I did it.
I did it
.”

A sickly chill passed through Jensen. “What did you do?” He sensed the answer that was coming, but he couldn’t stop himself from asking.

“Killed.” It took a massive effort for Stacks to force the word out of his lips. This was his confession, and he had to voice it. “I never told anyone… when that damned… signal came.” His metal hand scraped across the wet floor, almost of its own free will. “My family…” He shuddered, and coughed up a gush of fluid. “When it was over, all that was left were the pieces… of them…”

The blood. The severed limbs.
Suddenly it all made a horrible kind of sense. What could it have been like, to be a good man and then lose yourself in a torrent of madness? To awake and find all you loved destroyed, torn to shreds by your own hands?

Jensen silently cursed Hugh Darrow and his masters in the Illuminati’s inner circle for the lives they had trampled in the search for their lofty, high ideals.

Stacks gasped with pain and snatched at Jensen’s armor vest, grabbing the firing key for the remote detonator. “I got this,” he choked. “You go. You go, brother, you stop it.
You stop it all
!” The gang members were close, just seconds away.

“I will,” he said, with a grim nod. Jensen rose up, catching the stink of the leaking gas in his nostrils. He broke into a sprint back across the chamber, shoving his way through the dangling racks. There was yelling and gunshots behind him as a few of the more daring MCBs ventured into the room, searching for targets.

He didn’t see if Stacks triggered the detonator deliberately, or if it was some random nerve impulse that contracted his mechanical hand, but there was a sudden hammer of noise and fire at his back that pushed him up and off his feet, straight into the other doors at the far end of the recycling bay.

Jensen came through them like a cannonball, his eye shields snapping shut to protect him from the blast as he spun through the air. A fat plume of orange fire and black smoke followed him into the area past the bay, emerging across from a loading dock laden with empty polymer crates that scattered under the force of the explosion.

The world spun madly around him and Jensen collided with a storage rack that broke apart beneath him. The shrill ringing of the concussion echoed through his ears. Even with the aural augmentations in his skull, for long seconds all Jensen could hear was a high-pitched tone and a broken, random buzzing that made his jawbone itch.

As he hauled himself up, ignoring the sharp flares of pain across his body, the buzzing resolved itself into Pritchard’s voice. “
Jensen? Jensen, respond! I lost all the cameras, I don’t have any visuals…
”

“Still here,” he grunted. “Stacks… He took another way out.”

“
Oh
.” The bleak import of Jensen’s words hung in the air. “
All right. You need to get moving. Red flags are springing up all across the utility grid in that area, the fire from that explosion is only going to spread…
” He paused, and Jensen took the moment to get his bearings.

As Pritchard noted, the fire from the ruptured gas main was quickly taking hold, and the MCBs in the loading area had lost all sense of purpose other than self-preservation. Jensen caught sight of Cali, shouting at another of the gangers to get the last of their spoils on to the trucks, rather than abandon them to the flames.

“
Something else
,” said the hacker. “
More coded com broadcasts in your area. But its military-grade encryption, I can’t co-opt it.
”

“Same as before?”

“
I can’t tell
…”

He shook his head. “Never mind,” said Jensen, moving out of cover. He watched as Cali sprinted across the loading dock, finding Magnet with a shotgun in his hand and a murderous expression on his face. “I’m not done here yet.”

In the chaos from the explosion and the growing inferno, Jensen’s presence was now of less importance to the MCBs than securing their bounty before the warehouse came apart. As he sprinted along a walkway, Jensen heard the crash of breaking glass and the groan of damaged girders. Time was not on his side, but he couldn’t risk getting out of the area without being
sure
– sure that these military prototypes were not getting out into the world, sure that whoever was behind it was going to pay the price. And that person had to be the voice that was talking to the gang leader, Magnet. He had the next link in the chain.

Flecks of Stacks’s blood dotted Jensen’s armor and his face, and a hard-burning rage was rising in his chest. In that moment, he needed someone to hold responsible, someone he could
punish
for the wasteful death of an ordinary man who had gone in harm’s way because he believed in Jensen’s crusade.
It won’t be for nothing
, he told himself, making a silent vow.
I will stop this
.

He had only a split-second to make his choice, and Jensen did it without pause. He vaulted a safety rail and came down with the machine pistol at the ready.

“You!” he shouted at the thug with the gold optics. “You’re coming with me!”

Magnet swore violently as he saw Jensen emerge out of the smoke, and he shoved Cali toward him. “Man, who the fuck is this guy? Waste him!” As Cali drew his gun, Magnet sprinted away, more than happy to let his lieutenant deal with the troublesome intruder.

“You gonna pay for what you did, you son-of-a—” Jensen didn’t let Cali get the rest of the words out, instead firing a burst of bullets down in a low arc that shredded the ganger’s all-too-organic ankles and shins. Cali went down in a howling heap, his augmented arms clawing at the bloody ruins of his legs.

Jensen came in and kicked Cali’s gun away into the smoke, before letting off another spray of rounds into the wheels of the nearest truck. He aimed the Hurricane’s muzzle at Cali’s head as he loaded a fresh ammo magazine. “Where’s Magnet going? Who’s behind all this?
Answer me
!”

Cali whined in agony. “Offices upstairs or some shit, hadda get somethin’… The rest, I don’t know! Who gives a damn?”

Jensen looked away. “Reckon you can make it to safety if you start crawling right now,” he growled, as nearby part of the roof crumpled and fell inward. “Or maybe not. Your call.”

As Cali scrambled desperately toward the open loading gates, Jensen peered up into the thickening smoke. He felt the flutter in his chest as his rebreather kicked in, the implant acting like a micro-lung air reservoir. It wouldn’t last forever, but he guessed Magnet wasn’t going to stick around. “Pritchard, gimme a waypoint. I need to find the offices.”

“
You should be leaving, not going upstairs
,” came the irritable reply, as a marker icon popped into view on the heads-up display projected directly on to Jensen’s cyberoptics.

“Just find me that way out,” he snapped, and broke into a run.

* * *

He caught Magnet inside a corner office where the door had been kicked off its hinges. The gang leader was tearing the base of a desktop computer from its mount, in the process of stuffing it into a backpack. His shotgun was lying nearby, and he lunged for it, the awkward mass of the pack pulling him off balance.

Jensen fired high, bracketing Magnet with a full-auto burst. The sound merged with the clanging of the warehouse’s fire alarm. He wanted the gang leader alive, to find out what he knew, but Magnet didn’t flinch from the gunshots.

The MCB snatched at the Widowmaker and let off three chugging blasts in quick succession, firing wild to put Jensen off-balance. It had the desired effect, and he was forced to duck back out into the corridor.