Deus Ex - Icarus Effect (12 page)

rewarded with a pain-filled yelp. Natural bone broke easily under the turned steel of a heavy augmentation.

The giddy rush of speed made Saxon's skin prickle; he felt heat wash over him, and in a moment of sudden, shocking scent-memory, he smelled

aviation fuel and smoke. The crackle of the fires around the crashed veetol were abruptly there in the front of his thoughts, the horrible tearing

noise as Sam died in front of him—

Fury spread through Saxon like a wave, and he went in for the kill. The throat of the fallen guard he crushed with a brutal, stabbing blow from

his cyberarm; then he pulled a broken piece of roof support up from where it had landed and used it to beat the next of the guards bloody. The

last man, who fought back as he coughed and spat, struck out with a cyberhand that sprouted a fan of blades. Saxon took a cut across his cheek,

but the pain seemed distant, edited from the moment. He took the guard's arm—a spindly model sheathed in pink, flesh-toned plastic,

doubtless Federal Army surplus—and bent it back against the joint, fracturing the casing. The guard tried to struggle free, but Saxon took a

clump of his hair and beat his head into the walls until he fell.

The elevator chimed and Saxon let the guard's body go, allowing it to fall out and onto the dusty marble floor of the lobby.

Three more men were waiting for him, standing in a semicircle around the elevator bank, each with a heavy-caliber automatic raised and

aimed. The data feed from the wet-drive helpfully told him that these men were also members of the Bratva, each with a lengthy police record;

but the tips of the prison tattoos that emerged from the open collars of their shirts made that clear enough.

Saxon slowly raised his hands, panting, the moment of animal fury he had felt in the elevator fading as fast as it had come. For a few seconds

there, he had become lost, absorbed in rage-fueled guilt over Sam, Kano, and all the others. The edges of the dark anger he had first felt in the

field hospital boiled inside him.

He knew enough Russian to understand that the men with guns wanted him to kneel down. Carefully, he did what they asked, biding his time.

One of them would have to come close enough to take the Hurricane from him, and then, if there was a chance

Something shimmered like oil on water in the corner of Saxon's vision and he turned toward it in time to see a shape emerge out of the air, a

glassy, swift figure blurred by motion, abruptly becoming solid, real.

The military called it "mimeoptical active camouflage"; Saxon wasn't up on the full technical specs for the augmentation, but from what he

knew, the system used a matrix of molecule-thin induction wires implanted beneath the epidermis and across cyberlimb plating that when

activated, generated a local electromagnetic field that could render a human being into a walking stealth weapon. It was prohibitively expensive

and delicate under battlefield conditions, and difficulties with the human augmentation interface meant that it was rarely deployed in combat.

Full synchrony between the user and the system was hard to achieve; to use it well, you had to be someone with a near-pathological focus of

will.

The ghost figure became Federova, and she killed the first man with a slashing knife cut to the throat, dispatching the other two with quick,

silenced bursts from her machine pistol. She trembled slightly as the camouflage effect bled away, the focused EM field dissipating.

Federova looked across at him as he stood up, her scalp beaded with sweat; and then she smiled.

"Go tactical" ordered Namir.

The elevator doors came off their mountings in a screech of torn steel, and Barrett swung out behind them, snorting with effort. He dealt with

the guard closest to him with a savage backhand punch that drove bone shards up into the man's forebrain. The guard dropped to the

unfinished concrete floor, twitching as he died. Namir and Hermann came in a heartbeat later, their machine pistols snarling. Armor-piercing

rounds sprayed in fans, taking more kills.

One of the guards was still alive, and he stumbled toward a side corridor, bleeding heavily. The German was on him in a moment, and with a

haymaker punch from his armored fist, he crushed the man's skull with single blow.

"Move," snarled the commander. The mission was entering its full active phase; now speed, not stealth, was of the essence. Namir glanced

around, his eyes narrowing. The thirteenth floor did not match the spy photos captured by the intelligence sources of his patrons. Instead of

fitted deep pile carpets and bright walls patterned with subtle murals, the surroundings were bare and undecorated. The floor had the dusty

scent of old concrete and ozone. Where mahogany doors should have led the way to opulent suites and apartments, there were yawning open

frames walled off by ragged sheets of industrial polythene.

Hermann gave him a quizzical look. "This is not right."

"No," admitted Namir. "Proceed. And stay alert."

"Company," snapped Barrett, raising his arm. A group of four more thugs sprinted into view from along one of the radial corridors, each of them

armed with a heavy rifle.

"Take them," said Namir.

Barrett's right arm came apart on expanding frames, the plating folding back, the hand turning aside to allow the mechanism within to emerge;

he tugged an ammunition belt from a hopper in his backpack, swiftly slotting it into the feed maw on the base of the reconfigured limb. From

the wrist emerged the triple-head barrel of a minigun. The muzzles spun into a blur, and with a sound like the buzz of a heavy electric

generator, the cyberweapon ejected a gout of yellow fire and a storm of bullets. Grinning, Barrett panned the cannon across the corridor,

ripping through the flimsy flakboard the guards used for cover, tearing into them, blowing craters in the surface of the unfinished concrete.

"Advance! Kontarsky's rooms are just ahead." Namir surged forward, and the others went with him. Reaching the space where the grand suite

should have been, the Israeli reached up and tore aside a curtain of plastic.

Inside there was only another echoing, half-built space. Festoons of cables hung from the ceiling or snaked across the floor from drumlike power

cells; the room was hotter that the corridor outside, blood-warm and dry.

"What the hell ...?" Barrett scanned the room, his scarred face souring. "This is the wrong goddamn place! He's not here ... nobody is here!"

"Negative," insisted Hermann. "This is the correct location. Kontarsky should be in this room. We saw the thermographic scans ..."

"Why would six men guard nothing?" Namir demanded. He stalked across the open space, his footfalls echoing. Something about the

dimensions of the room seemed off; in front of the windows that looked out onto the Moscow dawn, there were long glassy panes arranged in a

barrier, running wall to wall and floor to ceiling. The power cords ran to connectors, and as Namir came close, he felt a steady surge of warmth

radiating from them.