SARIF INDUSTRIES – DETROIT – UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

The twin pillars of the building rose up into the midnight sky before them, and Jensen traced the shapes of the towers, black and dead against the rain that was falling. For a brief moment, it was like looking up at a giant grave marker, and the harshness of the mental image made him grimace. For all the light that David Sarif’s self-styled ‘beacon’ had cast over the streets of Detroit, it would always be cemented in Jensen’s mind as a place that had changed his life in darker ways than he would have wished.

Pritchard nodded toward the main entrance from beneath his hoodie. “Can’t get in that way,” he said. The first two floors of the building were surrounded by a fence topped with barbed wire, the windows blacked out by metal security grilles retrofitted to the walls. Dim lights moved around behind the panels, back and forth in regular patterns.

“Guards in there?” asked Stacks. His breathing was labored, but he was keeping up.

“Not human ones,” Pritchard explained. “Follow me. There’s another route inside.”

The streets were deserted here. Aside from the metallic rumble of the occasional passing people mover overhead, there was no-one around to see the three of them pick their way toward the locked entrance to the SI building’s underground car park.

A massive metal shutter sealed it off from the street level, but one corner of the panel had been dented and stove in. Jensen saw the hulk of a burned-out Motokun cargo truck nearby.

“Some people tried to break in the hard way,” said Pritchard, off his look. “They didn’t get very far.”

Rounding the front of the dead truck, Jensen saw that the grille and the windshield were a mess of bullet holes. Whatever weapon had done the damage was large-caliber and fully automatic. “Cops just let that happen?” he asked.

“They pulled out of the local police precinct after the riots,” said the hacker. “These days, the law doesn’t come down to this part of the city unless it’s in an APC or a gunship.”

“So, who did that?” Stacks pointed at the truck.

Pritchard jerked a thumb at the barrier. “The new owners.”

On the drop-gate there was a warning sign in Chinese, English and Spanish which made short work of explaining that this site now belonged to Tai Yong Medical Incorporated, and that intruders would face lethal force.

The hacker crouched low and peered into the gap between the floor and the bent door. “A little help?” He looked pointedly at Stacks.

The other man blew out a breath, and with a grunt of exertion, he pulled the bent corner of the door up a little more, enough so Pritchard could squeeze through. Jensen went after him, and Stack followed, shouldering awkwardly through the gap.

Inside, the parking garage was murky and the air held the lingering stink of burned plastics and battery acid. The smart-vision system in Jensen’s cyberoptics immediately adjusted for the low-light level, and he watched Pritchard advance gingerly across the concrete cavern. Keeping pace, the three men moved as silently as possible from one support pillar to another. In the far corner of the garage, Jensen saw a blinking crimson light on the exit door leading to the stairwell.

Pritchard had explained his intrusion plan on the way from the Rialto, and Jensen didn’t like it. While the hacker made his way to the door to disarm the alarm module in place there – along with the fragmentation mine it would trigger if set off – Jensen’s task would be to keep watch for the garage’s guardian. He’d already told Stacks to stick with Pritchard, framing it like he wanted the ex-steeplejack to protect the hacker, but more truthfully it was to keep him out of harm’s way. Stacks wasn’t a fighter, he didn’t have the instinct for it, and Jensen was afraid he would get the man killed.

They split apart, and Jensen drew his CA-4, flicking off the safety catch. He pulled back the slide to be sure a round was already in the chamber; there it was, the tip of the bullet glowing with a faint blue halo. The modified rounds were a gift from Pritchard, and instead of a lead head or a hollowpoint, they had a tiny pack of conductive gel and a super-dense capacitor at the tip. On impact, the shots released a small, focused electromagnetic pulse, supposedly powerful enough to give any electronic hardware a headache. If they didn’t work as advertised, he wouldn’t be around to complain about it.

Stalking around abandoned, dust-covered cars, Jensen moved deeper into the dimness. Off to his right, he heard the rattle and click of tools as Pritchard got to work on disarming the lock.

He stepped past a support pillar and his gaze fell on the perfect, straight edges of a giant cube measuring five meters along each axis. In the shadows, it was black and featureless, but as he watched the surface of the cube trembled. Jensen caught the sound of a muffled curse from the direction of Pritchard and Stacks.

The cube gave off a hydraulic sigh. Then with a flurry of motion, the sides of it folded up and away like some complex puzzle toy. The dormant Box-Guard robot, likely awakened by the hacker’s actions, was stirring.

Legs emerged from each corner, along with gun clusters and an articulated neck that ended in a rectangular, cyclopean head. Pin-lamps snapped on, flooding the garage with sodium-bright light – and found Jensen standing before it.

The Box-Guard hesitated a split-second, still getting its bearings as it rebooted, and that was the vital window of action Jensen needed. Aiming the semi-automatic at the robot’s head, he put a shot right into its sensor grid. Bright sparks flared, but all that seemed to do was narrow the machine’s focus. Its legs stomped as it turned in place to give Jensen its full attention. He heard the whine of servos as the gun pods spun up to power.

“Shit!” He stood his ground long enough to fire a few more shots, but the EMP rounds seemed to do little to slow it.

The Box-Guard made a grinding sound and advanced on him, picking up speed with each stride. Jensen broke into a sprint as it came after him, swerving aside as one of the robot’s legs kicked away a Navig subcompact, rolling the car on to its roof. The guns tracked him, swinging back and forth as they coughed out shotgun rounds, but Jensen dodged and wove between the parked vehicles, making it hard for the machine to target him. Belatedly, a recorded message began to play, a soothing female voice speaking in Chinese delivering some kind of demand for a surrender.

When the robot stumbled into a pillar, Jensen realized that the EMP rounds had made some difference, just not enough to deal with the machine outright. Its motions were becoming sluggish and drunken.

He took a breath of dusty air and circled back around a sedan, before launching himself right at the Box-Guard. If he could just place his shots in the right spot…

The robot slammed a leg into the concrete floor with enough force to knock him off-balance and his first round went wide. He fired another, clipping the side of the Box-Guard’s menacing head, and that seemed to agitate the machine. If it was having difficulty targeting him with its guns, then the robot’s programming told it to use a more direct, more kinetic approach instead.

Rearing up, the Box-Guard raised one leg and calculated the exact amount of hydraulic pressure to crush a human body. It loomed over Jensen, clipping its frame on a dangling light strip.

He fired, unloading every bullet remaining in the CA-4’s magazine, marching each flashing hit toward a gap in the plating beneath the Box-Guard’s head, where its flexible neck connected. Jolts of sparks vomited out from behind its single eye-lens, and the leg descended with a juddering clank, stopping just short of grinding Jensen into the dust. He rolled away as the machine repeated the action over and over, never quite completing it, stuck in some kind of loop.

“Jensen!” Pritchard’s nasal shout echoed across the garage. “Quick, get over here before it resets! The door’s clear!”

He sprinted over, mantling the hoods of parked cars. Pritchard held on to an inert mine template draped with dozens of connector wires, while Stacks shouldered open the door, revealing the stairwell beyond. “Gotta go, gotta go!”

“Don’t wait for me.” An idea flashed through Jensen’s mind and he snatched the explosive device out of Pritchard’s hands, reactivating it as he raced back the way he had come. He ignored their calls to follow, pausing long enough to toss the frag mine under the shuddering Box-Guard before doubling back once again.

Jensen was at the door, wrenching it closed behind him when the robot finally snapped itself out of its temporary malaise – and stamped down, right on top of the mine template. The explosive detonated with a flat, loud crack and the Box-Guard toppled.

“So much for the quiet approach,” snapped Pritchard.

Jensen shot him a cold look, and started up the stairs toward the upper level. “Next time, have a better plan.”

* * *

They emerged through a service door and into the main atrium of the SI building. What hit Jensen first was the smell of stale smoke, an acrid stink that lay heavy in the air all around them. Across the reception area, where once there had been illuminated video-pillars showcasing the achievements of Sarif Industries, there was only a mess of half-dismantled machinery and piles of broken office furniture. Along the walls near the sealed main door there was a wide black stain that reached up to the second level of the atrium. The slick of old soot and melted plastic was like a great burn wound.

“Firebombs,” Pritchard said quietly, by way of explanation. “Courtesy of the good people of Detroit. Never mind that the company had nothing to do with the incident.” He shook his head. “Idiots. Like trying to burn down a hospital just because someone gets sick.”

“P-people get afraid, they need someone to blame…” muttered Stacks. “Ain’t no-one’s fuh-fault.”

Jensen saw splashes of paint over the doors and angry scrawls over the glass – slogans like AUGS OUT and DIE HANZERS! left behind in the aftermath.

He looked away as movement caught his eye. Set out across the atrium, there were stubby, drum-shaped sensor pods endlessly scanning the area with laser rangers. Each had a multi-barreled gun atop them, and they were actively tracking back and forth. The Box-Guard in the parking garage would have sent a warning to all the units on the security network, upping their alert status to full. Above, on the second and third levels, Jensen saw small, wheeled robots wandering in pre-programmed patrol loops, the same kind of armed sentry that had threatened him outside the Chiron Building apartments.

“Typical Tai Yong…” Pritchard crouched in the lee of what used to be the reception desk. “Too cheap to bring in any real security.”

“You forgetting that mech downstairs?” said Jensen.

Pritchard ignored him. “They’re using SI’s own robots, they just reprogrammed them for deterrent duty.” He tugged on a zip at his cuff that opened the sleeve of his coat along the length of his forearm, revealing a flexible keyboard and monitor screen clipped to the inside of his wrist. The hacker went to work, his other hand dancing across the panel. “Their protocols are always sloppy. Hengsha’s never produced a single decent black hat…”

“What are you doing?” Jensen demanded.

The hacker sighed. “TYM’s acquisition team take what they want and abandon-in-place everything else. And they typically don’t bother to deep-sweep the main grid for backdoor passwords embedded by, oh, let’s say, the company’s former head of digital security.” Pritchard’s wrist-keyboard gave an answering beep and he showed a sly grin. “Done. Now those bots will register us as friendlies.” He got up and walked out of cover. “You were actually right for once, Jensen. This was easier than I thought it would be.”

“Easy for you,” Jensen muttered.

Pritchard ignored him and approached one of the pods. It momentarily tracked him with a red thread of laser light; then the beam snapped to green and moved on as if he wasn’t there.

“Whoa,” said Stacks. “Your… buddy, uh, he’s real impressed with himself, yeah?”

Jensen nodded. “And then some.” He paused, eyeing the other man as he walked awkwardly after the hacker, clearly in pain. “Can you handle this?”

“I… got it.” Irritably, Stacks waved him away. He was sweating and his breathing was shallow. “This place, brother, it gives me the damned creeps.”

“I hear you,” Jensen told him, the honesty of his own response giving him a moment’s pause. He offered his hand to Stacks, but the other man refused with a scowl and moved off without him, trying not to draw attention to the tremors going through the fingers at the end of his hulking arms.

Jensen followed, but his own thoughts kept straying as a steady stream of old memories washed over him. He’d come here partly hoping to reconnect with his past, but it wasn’t working the way he wanted it to.

Being inside the Sarif building seemed somehow unreal to him, the knowledge of the place where he had worked filtered through a lens of uncertainty. He knew the layout of the office complex intimately, but part of him felt as if he had never set foot in there before, as if it were all some kind of abstract illusion.

Jamais vu, he remembered. That was the term for it, the polar opposite of déjà vu, the eerie sense of when something intimately familiar felt totally new. His eyes narrowed and he shook off the feeling with a physical shrug. As he did so, he caught sight of a dim corner of the atrium where the remembrance monument had been situated.

Back in 2027, a group of mercenaries known as the Tyrants had struck the company and many lives had been lost. Jensen’s was almost counted among them. What at first had seemed like a covert attack by one of Sarif Industries’ corporate rivals was revealed as the cover for the multiple kidnappings of several of SI’s top scientists. It was only Jensen’s dogged investigation of the assault that allowed him to track down the missing in the custody of Hugh Darrow, who had secretly abducted the group to work on his biochip control scheme at the Illuminati’s behest. Everyone else had thought they were dead, many laying the blame for that at Jensen’s feet – he had been in charge of security that day – and for a long time, a monument had stood to honor their loss… and his failure. But he had always known they were alive.

I always knew she was still alive, thought Jensen.

“Why don’t you just get it over with and ask the question?” He turned to find Pritchard close by, watching him intently. The other man nodded toward the smoke-blackened monument.

“What happened to… the others?” He frowned, angry at himself for being unable to draw up the words he really wanted to utter. “You said David Sarif went off the grid, but what about the rest?”

“For the most part, the people who worked here were either caught up in the incident or else they scattered to the four winds soon after.” Pritchard folded his arms. “I know that Sarif’s assistant, Athene… she quit after what happened. Couldn’t live with herself being part of the company after all the chaos. She was the first to go. Your security teams were kicked out when Tai Yong bought up the company assets.” He paused, thinking. “Malik, the pilot… Last time I saw her she was with you, heading off to Hengsha, so you would know better than me.” Pritchard shook his head. “But we both know who you’re really interested in.”

Jensen bit out the name. “Megan Reed.”

The hacker gave a nod. “I’ll never understand that woman’s attachment to you, Jensen. You were never good for her.”

There were a hundred different retorts that pushed at Jensen for release, and for a brief moment he hated Pritchard for making him face that cold truth head-on. He must have seen that flash of pure fury in Jensen’s eyes, because Pritchard’s superior expression slipped for a moment.

“I went halfway around the world for her,” Jensen said, at length. “I found out the truth.”

And that truth was complex and troubling. Before coming to work at Sarif, they had been lovers, even spoke of settling down together, and although it hadn’t worked out, Jensen could not deny that he had still carried some affection for her. Maybe that had been what fueled his search after the Tyrants attacked, at least at first. But in the end, he had discovered that Megan Reed’s priorities were very different from his own.

She’d kept secrets from him, sampling his DNA in hopes of isolating his unique super-compatibility, even ensuring he would be offered a job at Sarif Industries to keep him close. And when at last he had confronted her with that, her reaction wasn’t what he’d expected. Megan believed she was working in the name of a greater good, and Jensen still wasn’t sure if she was right or wrong.

Pritchard’s tone shifted. “All I know is that Megan came back to Detroit after Panchaea, and then she vanished. But there have been rumors that she’s working for Versalife, maybe in their Hong Kong or San Francisco labs.”

“And Versalife is an Illuminati front.” Jensen let that sink in. “I don’t know what to make of that.”

“For what it’s worth… I’m sorry,” said the hacker.

Jensen took whatever emotional reaction was forming and crushed it before it could coalesce. “It’s over and done,” he said firmly. “Come on, we’ve got work to do.”

* * *

Stacks was waiting for them by the elevator bank, and Pritchard ran another bypass subroutine to call a lift car down from the upper floors. Jensen drew his gun and reloaded it as they began their ascent to the laboratory levels, while Stacks kept to the corner of the elevator, panting hard.

Pritchard eyed the other man and shot Jensen a questioning look, but he said nothing.

“What are the odds this place will have what we need?” Jensen watched the floor number display count up and up. “Didn’t you say Tai Yong stripped most of it?”

“Only what was portable, and what their goons could actually get into.” Pritchard gave a brief, smug smile. “Someone might have tampered with the key codes on his way out the door…”

“Can… we get out soon?” Stacks breathed. “Too close in here.”

There was a hollow ping and the elevator halted, the doors parting to reveal darkness beyond them. “We’re here,” said Jensen.

“Testing and quality control,” Pritchard told them. “Main power is off on this floor, but I should be able to get the emergency batteries up and running.” He reached into the daypack on his back, retrieving a spherical drone. The hacker gave it a twist and tossed it into the air, where it floated away on micro-rotors. The unit immediately cast out a weak orange glow that spilled over desks, chairs and other equipment, casting strange, jumping shadows.

Jensen stepped out, his pistol raised, with Pritchard right behind him.

Stacks came last, but he made it only a few steps before his trembling iron hands came up to his face and he started screaming.

FIVE

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