Deus Ex: Black Light (6 page)

Jensen slipped into the cab alongside him and confirmed what he already suspected. The pick-up had only local tags, and no clearance for interstate travel, which meant the moment they took to the freeway, police drones would be scrambled to intercept them.

“That’s gonna happen no matter what,” said Stacks. “Odds are, our pals back at the ranch are calling the State Troopers right now with a description of these wheels.”

Jensen shook his head. “I don’t think so. I know how these people work. Thorne’s gonna use her own assets to come after us first. Locals will be a last resort.”

Stacks shot him a look. “
These people
?” he echoed. “Ain’t that the World Health Organization you’re talking about? You make ’em sound like the, what, the CIA.”

“You just spent eighteen months being held prisoner by them,” Jensen shot back. “You tell me.”

“Fair point…” Stacks conceded. “Shit. This is all fucked up.”

“No argument here.” Jensen leaned over the sat-nav screen, scrolling around the map. “Look, there’s an automated service station where the roads link up. Head there. We’ll ditch this thing, find another vehicle.”

Stacks scowled. “Hate to break it to you, brother, but if you and me ain’t the only humans within fifty miles of that, I’d owe you a buck. Nothing but them goddamn big-ass robo-trucks run up and down this stretch of road, from Anchorage down to the border or back to the oil wells. Alla that acid rain and everything, Alaska don’t get tourists no more. Towns round here are dead and gone.”

“I know,” said Jensen. “And I got a way we can use that. We get on board one of those automated rigs, we can ride it down to Juneau, get a connection back to the States. Put as much distance as we can between us and Facility four-five-one.”

“I hear you,” Stacks said, with feeling. “But you forgetting, those mechs have killer security, yeah? Don’t take no hitch-hikers.”

“Yeah.” Jensen ran a hand over the hexagonal plate above his right eye, bringing another of his augmentations back to life. “I know a guy who can help us with that.”

As Stacks predicted, the auto-station was utterly devoid of human life, and likely had been for a long time. A few faceless tanker trucks emblazoned with corporate logos, their prows bristling with antennae and sensor palps, filled machine-controlled refueling bays where spidery crane arms fed power umbilicals into waiting slots on their flanks. Jensen watched one of them finish topping up the charge in its massive batteries, and detach itself with a surge of movement. The robotic vehicle cruised past him toward the freeway on-ramp, infrared running lights flicking on. A shocker turret mounted on the side of the tanker turned to track him as he stood there, a mute warning to stay away. The simple artificial intelligences that drove these trucks had only a cursory interest in humans, as either obstacles to be avoided or potential hijackers to be terminated. The price of real fossil fuel made the theft of such transporters from the vast Alaskan fracking fields an ongoing problem, so the machines were programmed to automatically distrust anything organic that approached them.

Jensen watched it go, accelerating to over a hundred miles per hour in a skirl of tire noise. He frowned and looked away, considering his next move. They didn’t have a lot of time, maybe a twenty-minute lead on their pursuers at best. He would need to work quickly.

The auto-station had some cursory shelter, an afterthought built into the place on the off-chance that someone flesh-and-blood might be unfortunate enough to find themselves stranded out here. Behind a thick, windproof door with failing seals, chairs and tables made out of a kind of extruded polymer were lined up across from a fetid chemical toilet, an emergency phone, a broken wall-screen and a pair of vending machines that were out of order. The latter hadn’t stopped Stacks from using his augmented strength to peel open their shells and help himself to what was still inside. Jensen eyed the bloated cans of expired Nuke Cola, the crumbling packs of Soy, and grimaced.

“That junk’ll poison you,” he told the other man. “It’s gotta be old enough to have kids.”

Stacks offered him a stale Proenergy bar. “Don’t get to be picky. So. What about your guy?”

Jensen reluctantly took the packet. “Any second now…”

“Let me know how it goes.” Opening a salvaged pack of caffeine sticks, Stacks lit one with a shaky hand and wandered outside.

Within a day of being there, Jensen had realized that Facility 451 was surrounded by a masking field that smothered any kind of long-range cellular signals. While he was inside, his implanted infolink was dead metal, unable to transmit or receive, blocked from even the most basic tracking signal. But now he was a few miles clear of 451, and with nothing to interrupt the feed, the infolink was rebooting itself. The start sequence concluded, and for anyone who knew the implant’s covert contact protocols, Adam Jensen was effectively back on the grid.

Two minutes later, a familiar voice echoed through the transceiver implant in Jensen’s mastoid bone. “
Who is this
?” The demand was brusque and distrustful.

“Hello, Francis.”

On the other end of the line, Jensen heard a sharp intake of breath. “
Identify yourself
.
Or I cut this transmission right now and scrub the contact
.”

“I don’t have time for games, Pritchard. It’s me. I figured you’d still be monitoring this comm-code.”

“
After a year of silence
?” Frank Pritchard’s tone rose, becoming terse and sneering. “
Maybe I should
—” He stopped, catching himself, and his manner changed. “
Adam Jensen was listed as missing presumed dead after the destruction of the Panchaea complex. I have no reason to believe that fact isn’t true. If you’re Jensen, prove it
.”

“Your middle name is Wendell. Your hacker handle is Nuclearsnake. With a number 3. Good enough?”

“
Any competent investigator could dig up that data.
”

“You’re also a prick.”

There was a long pause. “
Well
,” said Pritchard at length. “
If you’re
not
Jensen, you’re a very convincing emulation of him
.” He paused again. “
Locator ping is showing you in… Alaska? Perhaps you could provide some kind of explanation as to why—
”

“No time,” Jensen cut him off. “If you got the location, you know exactly where I am. I need a ride, Pritchard, and I need it now.”

“
Is that all? You contact me out of the blue because you need a favor?
”

“Pretty much, yeah. Can you do it?”

“
Of course I can do it
,” the hacker snorted. “
Where do you need to go
?”

The door banged open and Stacks rushed in. “Jensen! I seen a chopper, off out to the west, lights scanning the road. Coming this way.” He shook his head. “We got about five minutes before they’re here, no more.”

He nodded to the other man and looked away. “Detroit,” he told Pritchard. “It’s time I came home.”

It was cramped and uncomfortable in the automated truck’s maintenance compartment, barely big enough for the two men to share it without stepping on top of one another. But somehow they managed the journey in companionable silence for the most part, Stacks gently snoring his way through it and Jensen hovering on the edge of the same, but never quite allowing himself to slip fully away into sleep.

With nothing but a small glass porthole in the hatchway, there was no view to speak of, and so Jensen gave up on marking the passage of time as the vehicle headed eastward through the day and into the night. It was early evening when he felt the truck start to slow down from the constant pace it had kept up since Alaska, and he nudged Stacks with his boot.

“I’m awake,” grumbled the other man. “We there yet?”

“Looks like.” The truck rocked and he felt it shifting lanes, until finally it came to a halt. The hatch hissed open on hydraulics and a gust of cold, damp air blew in. Jensen climbed out, grimacing at the aches in his back as his boots hit the road.

Stacks was a step behind him, taking a deep, grateful breath. “Man, that whole rig stinks of oil. I almost forgot what fresh air tastes like.” He coughed and spat. “Well, not that this air is so fresh, neither…”

They were barely out of the compartment before the hatch hissed shut and the truck rumbled away, leaving them behind on the shoulder of the freeway. Jensen glanced around, finding a road sign telling him they were on an elevated section of I-94 – the Detroit Industrial Expressway, just past Dearborn. As he got his bearings, he turned around and found the dark band of the river to the east, beyond the ill-lit streets of Mexicantown. And further to the north, the city of Detroit itself, a cluster of skyscrapers that glowed faintly through the low cloud. A fire was burning steadily out there, and the flames reflected off the bottom of the cloudbank, giving it a sullen glow. Jensen picked out the Renaissance Center toward the riverfront and used that as a reference mark to search for the twin pillars of the Sarif Industries building.

For a jarring moment, it seemed as if the towers had been erased from the skyline. He was used to seeing the glass and steel spars lit from within by soft golden light for miles around. His optics adjusted for the distance, and he realized what was wrong.

The Sarif towers were still there, but they were pitch dark against the night sky, no illumination visible in them except for the pinpricks of crimson aircraft warning lights at the very highest levels.

Stacks made a show of looking around. “Nice place here. Now I’m wishing I’d got your buddy Pritchard to detour us to Seattle instead.”

“He’ll get you there, if that’s what you want.”

“Maybe…” Stacks winced and shifted his arm stiffly. “Don’t know if I’m ready to go back,” he went on, almost to himself.

Jensen crossed to the guard rail, casting a wary look over his shoulder at the traffic streaming past behind him on the freeway. He pressed a fingertip to his mastoid bone, bringing his infolink out of sleep mode. “Pritchard. You there?”

The response took a moment. “
Welcome home, Jensen. A pity it’s not under better circumstances.
” Was that sarcasm, or a note of real regret in the other man’s voice? It was hard to tell with someone like Frank Pritchard. “
There’s a metro station to your northeast. Get there, head into the ticket hall.
”

“Copy,” he nodded, beckoning Stacks to follow him.

“
Watch your step
,” Pritchard added, “
and try not to draw any attention. This city’s not how it was when you were last here.
”

The two of them slipped over the rail and made their way down a steep embankment, emerging in what used to be the grounds of a public park. Once there had been a line of trees to screen off the area from the noise of the freeway, but all of them had been cut down for firewood, with lines of ragged stumps protruding from the yellowing, piebald grass.

The park was choked with people, hundreds of the homeless packed into a makeshift campground built out of discarded packing materials, the shells of stripped vehicles and ragged sails of plastic sheeting. Groups of them clustered around oil drum fires, while others stayed concealed in the deep shadows that fell in the gloom. There were no working streetlights, many of them cut down like the trees and others torn open at the root so power-snatchers could tap into the city’s electrical grid.

Wary faces caught sight of Jensen and Stacks, some seeing strangers and electing to turn away, others measuring them with rapacious, threatening gazes.

“Didn’t we just leave this party?” muttered Stacks.

“No guards here, though,” Jensen said quietly.

“Wanna bet?” The other man nodded toward the gates of the park, where a police cruiser slowly rode past, a cop in the passenger seat using a handheld spotlight to cast a beam over the faces of the dispossessed and desperate.

“Hey,” said a voice, and Jensen felt a tug on the hem of his jacket. He looked down and saw an emaciated young woman with an athlete’s recurved cyberlegs splayed out beside her. The legs were Kusanagi models, he noted – a high-grade brand, not that it seemed to matter here. The woman held up a crumpled disposable cup, gesturing with a stub where her other arm should have been. It ended at the elbow joint in a cluster of bare metal connectors and trailing wires. “You help a sister out? Spare some change or a little nu-poz, yeah?”

Jensen’s lips thinned. “I can’t do anything for you.”

The woman turned her attention on Stacks. “How about it?”

Stacks hesitated, his expression tightening. “I… I don’t have any pozy on me, girl. I’m real sorry about that.”

“Then fuck off,” she snapped, her expression turning spiteful.

“Look, I—” Stacks started to say something else, but Jensen pulled him away.

“You heard the lady. Come on. Keep walking.”

“Yeah, you better!” shouted the woman, rising unsteadily to her feet. “Don’t come down here and pretend you’re better than us! Goddamn wrench!” She hissed, flinching in pain with each step she took after them, finally tottering to a halt.

Jensen had seen the effects of neuropozyne withdrawal before, and it was always an ugly, sorrowful sight. Part of the forced bargain anyone with human augmentations had to make, synthetic anti-rejection drugs like neuropozyne were a necessary evil. Anyone who had an implant or a cybernetic limb was subject to a condition known as DDS – Darrow Deficiency Syndrome – where glial tissue would slowly build up around the interface between the augmentation’s electrode pick-ups and the implantee’s nerves. Neuropozyne kept those connections working, but without regular doses, augmentations would start to misfire and cause severe pain, seizures, and in the worst cases, systemic nerve damage. The drug’s availability had always been controlled, and it had always been costly, but in the wake of the incident Jensen had to wonder how much harder it had become to get hold of it. There were few alternatives, with poisonous ‘street’ versions cooked up by criminal gangs and hazardous untested variants like riezene taking more lives than they saved.