Deus Ex: Black Light by James Swallow Read Free Book Online

the far side, picking out the shapes of snow-dusted trucks and jeeps. “Vehicle park just over there… We need to—”
    “I got this.” Stacks pushed him aside and flexed his artificial arms.
    “Let me help you with that.” Jensen found the inhibitor he wore and pressed the prod to its surface. “This is gonna hurt.” He didn’t wait for Stacks to reply, and fired a crackling surge of voltage into the device.
    Stacks cried out in pain, and Jensen caught the acrid stink of burning plastic. Then suddenly the other man was at the fence line, clawed fingers tearing into the metal links. Sparks flew in showers of orange as he ripped open a ragged tear in the enclosure, and belatedly sirens began to sound across the length of the compound.
    Above the sirens, Jensen heard a high-pitched whine and glimpsed an insect-like shape rising off the roof of the main building, angling toward them. “Drone incoming! We gotta move!”
    Discarding his burnt-out inhibitor, Stacks shouldered his way through the inner fence and repeated his destructive actions at the outer line. Jensen followed him through and out. For what seemed like the first time in forever, both men were beyond the walls of the complex that had confined them – but they were far from being free.
    Guards emerged from the isolation block and the main building, hooded figures seen through the rain as it came down harder. Jensen’s optics picked out weapons in their hands. Not stunners this time, but short-frame bullpup flechette rifles.
    “Your show now, man!” said Stacks. “What do we do?”
    “You know how to hotwire a truck?” Jensen jabbed a finger toward a pick-up parked a few meters away, the flatbed piled high with maintenance gear and spares. It was an older, gasoline-powered model from the 2010s, more reliable in the colder Alaskan temperatures than modern hybrids or e-cars.
    “Hotwire?” Stack repeated. “What, they never teach you that in cop school?”
    Jensen’s reply died in his throat as something fast whistled past his head, dropping to skitter away across the wet tarmac. He whirled around just in time to see a second object strike Stacks harmlessly on the ironclad shoulder of his aug arm. A tranquilizer dart.
    “Start it up!” he shouted, catching sight of the drone again as the airborne robot pivoted in mid-air. The bigger cousin to the little monitors that buzzed about the corridors of 451, this unit was the size of a soccer ball, held between four spinning rotors, with a chin turret of sensors surrounding the black barrel of a tranq gun.
    The drone took aim, but as it fired again Jensen dashed toward it, shortening the distance so the dart shot went wide and hit nothing. Sweeping down into a low turn, he scooped up a wad of dirty slush from the ground and threw it at the hovering drone. The makeshift snowball struck its camera eye with a wet smack and the drone’s rotors shrilled in complaint as the unit momentarily lost its target.
    Behind him, Jensen heard Stacks grunt with effort and then the crunching grind of tearing metal. He turned to see that the other man had ripped off the door to the pick-up and now stood hunched over the steering wheel, yanking at wires. Jensen sprinted back to the vehicle, pulling down the tailgate, looking for anything to use as a weapon.
    “Ha-ha!” Stacks let out a cry of victory as the truck’s motor turned over and caught. “We’re rollin’ now!”
    “Not yet…” Jensen snatched at a length of metal rebar and dragged it out of the flatbed as the drone shook off his distraction and came diving at them. For a moment, he held it like an over-long sword, wondering if he could swat the robot out of the air before it pegged him with another dart. But then something better occurred to him, and he let the targeting augmentation keyed to his cyberoptics go active. Jensen turned the rod in his hand until he held it like a javelin, and at the last second he threw it into the air. The blunt tip of the