MILWAUKEE JUNCTION – DETROIT – UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Jensen crouched behind the burned-out husk of a cargo truck and surveyed the flanks of the four-story factory building across the way. If anything, it was in a worse state than the Sarif Industries tower, with not a single exterior window unbroken or a meter of the exterior that wasn’t covered with hateful anti-aug graffiti. Thick concrete jersey barriers had been dropped into place around it to fence off the facility, and expandable metal blockades covered all the doors and access panels across the side of the factory he could see. Getting in wasn’t going to be easy, Jensen reflected.

“I’ve got the blueprints for the building up in front of me…” Pritchard’s voice issued out over his infolink. “There’s an annex off to the west, do you see it? A two-story compound, a warehouse.”

Jensen found the slab-sided building. “Got it.” There was movement around the base of the annex, but he could only get a partial view through the scattered wreckage and debris across the open area between his hiding place and the building.

“When the stock market crashed and SI shares tanked, the last thing the board of directors did was order all the hardware off the production line. There was a plan to sell it to Kusanagi. Liquidate the assets for cash to hold off the death spiral they were in. But it never happened. Kusanagi were bought out by Tai Yong and the deal collapsed. Whatever is left in that building is the last of Sarif Industries’ augmentations, still waiting for TYM to come in and strip them to the bare metal.”

“Then the prototypes will be there,” said Jensen quietly. “If Tai Yong knew they existed, they would have emptied it already.”

“No doubt,” Pritchard replied.

A figure moved, low and quick off to Jensen’s left, and his hand tensed around his pistol. He didn’t want to fire a weapon unless he had no other option. Without a sound suppressor, any gunshot would carry across the factory compound and then all bets were off.

The shadow resolved into Stacks, his high shoulders arched forward as he dashed from cover to cover. Jensen relaxed a little as the big man skidded to a halt beside him. “Hey,” he began, breathing hard. He jerked a talon-like finger at a half-collapsed building behind them. “I got up there like you asked, put down that camera thing.” His head bobbed. He was sweaty and tense. “Okay?”

Jensen nodded. “Good. Pritchard, you copy that? Remote camera is online.”

“I have it,” said the hacker. “Position isn’t optimal but it’ll have to do. Scanning the annex exterior now…”

With all network access to the manufacturing plant’s internal security system cut off, they had been forced to figure out a work-around. Pritchard supplied Jensen with a couple of ‘sticky’ wireless micro-cameras – one of which was clipped to the front of his body armor – that could be placed in any location and monitored remotely.

“What did you see up there?” said Jensen.

Stacks showed him a grave face. “A lot of guys, man.” He pointed. “Far side is all lit up. Gotta couple of trucks there, as well, looks like they crashed ’em through the gates. Loading up stuff.”

Jensen had explained the situation to Stacks back at the Rialto. The mil-spec augs, the threat they posed, all of it. The other man hadn’t hesitated to offer his help, even though Jensen could tell he was way out of his element, and scared by the danger they were in. That Stacks was still willing to back up Jensen spoke for the man’s character.

“I was right,” said Jensen. “They’re moving the hardware out of here.”

“Looks like,” Pritchard added. “I have a visual now.” He paused. “It seems that ‘army’ we were warned about are old friends.”

“A whole bunch of gang-bangers out there,” Stacks was saying. “Same colors as those creeps who were giving your buddy shit.”

“The MCBs?” Jensen considered this new information. “They’re moving up from exterminating rival gangs to dealing in stolen tech. That’s a big step.”

“Confirmed. Jensen, watch yourself. I see two men taking up a position across from you. They’re armed.”

He fell silent at Pritchard’s warning and motioned for Stacks to do the same. Moving slowly, Jensen peered out from behind the ruined truck and found the pair. He saw the telltale yellow bandanas and loose-fit jackets favored by the Motor City Bangers, and noted that both of the men carried Hurricane machine pistols on straps over their shoulders. They shared a joke over something and one of them pulled a conical drug vial from his pocket, jamming it into his neck for a quick shot while the other lit a cigarette. Their body language reflected only boredom, not alertness – but the two of them were between Jensen and the only way into the annex that was in shadow. Attempting entry by any other route would be dangerous in the extreme.

After a minute or so, it became clear the two MCBs were in no hurry to leave. “You’re going to have to deal with them,” noted Pritchard.

“I figured that,” Jensen muttered.

Stacks gave him a sideways look and tapped a metal finger to his temple. “Snakey giving you trouble?”

“Tell him not to call me that,” snapped Pritchard.

Jensen nodded. “Stay here. I’ll go take care of the guards.”

Stacks looked doubtful. “Nothing but open ground over there. They’ll see you soon as you step out.”

“I don’t think so.” Jensen stood up and holstered his pistol, before calling up a nerve-impulse pattern to interface with another of his implants. It was energy-hungry and he’d been reluctant to use it until now, but after the scan at SI showed his augs were still in good working order, he was willing to chance it. “Now you see me…”

Jensen trigged his thermoptical camouflage and light bent around him, turning his shape into a shimmering, hollow outline. Stacks jerked back in shock, as if he’d seen a ghost.

“Now you don’t,” concluded Jensen, and slipped away.

* * *

He moved slowly and carefully, making sure he did as little as possible to disrupt the pattern field, aware of the ever-present energy drain on his bio-cell batteries. Each wary step brought him closer to the two MCBs and the muzzles of their machine pistols. If they made him, he’d be cut down before he could react.

“You don’t know a damn thing,” the smoker was telling his compatriot, waving the cigarette in the air between the fingers of a gold-plated cyberarm. “That ain’t how it happened. Folks didn’t go crazy because of no germs, fool. The incident was all down to the gov’ment!”

The other ganger bounced on the balls of his feet, the pistons in his augmetic legs hissing with each motion. “What makes you the one who knows?” His speech was slightly slurred, and Jensen recognized the effects of a zee dose. The artificial neurochemical was a potent street drug that was popular among Detroit’s criminal underclass. The other MCB snapped his mouth open and shut. “Millions of people wind up dead? That ain’t just the government, man. Too big for that.” He shook his head vigorously. “Those coghatin’, natch-lovin’ Purity First assholes did it! Them and that Humanity Front, pretending they’s all decent and shit, but they was in it together, they made a killer virus! Sent everybody loco, is what it did.” He flexed his arms. “Heard it from a guy who used to work at LIMB, man. That’s stone cold truth.”

Jensen crept closer, moving to keep himself out of their fields of view. He was almost in range.

The smoker cleared his throat and spat into the weeds sprouting through the damaged tarmac at his feet. “Nope. Let me tell you what’s real. The Man, he want to keep us down ’cos of this!” He curled his metal-clad fingers into a defiant fist. “The Man kisses up to those corporate sons-of-bitches and they mess with the pozy! That’s how they did it, yeah? Con-tam-in-ate-ed.” He sounded out the word for extra emphasis. “They knew it was a bad batch, but they still wanted their paper. And now they get to come down hard on all us cogs, pretend like it was our fault!” He spat again. “Hey! You listening to me?”

The other ganger was looking away, staring into nothing. “Reckon I saw something moving, is all.”

“You crazy,” snorted the smoker, taking another long drag.

“He’s really not,” said Jensen, decloaking between the pair of them. Both the MCBs reacted with shouts of alarm and went fumbling for their guns, but neither of them were fast enough to avoid Jensen’s reflex-boosted attack as he struck out and grabbed them by their necks. With a single, lighting-fast move, he yanked them off-balance and cracked their skulls against one another with enough force to knock them both unconscious. He released his grip and let them slump into a heap among the overgrowth.

Stacks burst out of cover and sprinted to his side. “That is some neat trick,” he said. “I know you said back at 451 that you was some kinda cop, but level with me. Is that all you is?”

“I’m someone trying to do right,” he told him. “That’s what matters.” Jensen gathered up the machine pistols and ammo clips from the two fallen gangers and Stacks followed him to the sealed doorway.

* * *

The expandable metal barrier blocking the entrance had a magnetic lock holding it closed, and Jensen took a second to consider how he was going to deal with it.

Stacks shook his head and pushed him aside. “Allow me.” The ex-steeplejack reached down, and with a spin of his wrist, he wrenched the lock mechanism out of the frame. “Easy…”

Despite Stacks’s wary grin, Jensen still saw the tremors in his artificial hand. “I need you focused,” he told him. “Okay?”

“No… no problem,” Stacks breathed. “I’m just a little new to this breaking and entering stuff, is all.”

“Stay close and watch my back.” He handed the other man one of the machine pistols. Stacks took it like it was poisonous. “Don’t use it unless you have to.”

“You can… count on that.”

Jensen put his shoulder to the barrier and forced it open. Passing through, they emerged on a raised platform above a sunken loading bay. It ran the full length of the building, vanishing into darkness and shadows. But a few hundred meters away, there was a knot of activity illuminated by the lights Stacks had seen from the rooftops.

“Tread careful,” Jensen whispered, and then set off in a crouched walk, panning his gaze from side to side. The smart vision implant in his skull parsed the environment around him, projecting a sensor grid overlay on to his optical display, highlighting movement and potential targets. There were a lot of gangers down there, some of them milling around with weapons at the ready, others working in a ragged line as they carried plastic containers out from deeper in the warehouse annex.

Jensen halted in the lee of a support pillar and watched as two men hefted a long box into the back of a six-wheeler cargo truck. The familiar stylized seraph’s wing logo of Sarif Industries was visible on the side of the crate.

“Ishtar-model leg augmentations,” said Pritchard; for a moment, Jensen had forgotten that the hacker was seeing more or less exactly what he did. “At least, that’s what the barcode on the box says. In reality, it could be anything in there.”

“That’s not mech limbs,” said Jensen, as he caught sight of another MCB ganger approaching, pushing a wheeled barrow with an open crate atop it. He saw the recognizable honeycomb pattern of Typhoon modules inside, wrapped in plastic packing sheets. Distributed around the torso and limbs of an implantee, they could project a series of directed-blast explosive spheres, effectively turning the user into a human cluster bomb.

Another ganger stepped in the way and Jensen saw a face he knew – the one called Cali, who had tried to shake down Pritchard for protection. “There’s your buddy with the attitude problem,” he said quietly, watching as a bull-necked man wearing a reversed baseball cap came striding over to interrupt Cali’s conversation.

“This guy looks like… like he’s in charge,” muttered Stacks from nearby.

Jensen nodded in agreement. The new arrival had implanted eye shields, gold mirrors that were thick and round like antique coins. He sneered as he spoke harshly to Cali, revealing more gold worked into his teeth. One arm was artificial, plated with a fake skin-tone sheath and lines of white chaser lights beneath the polymer epidermis. The rest of the MCBs gave him a respectful berth as he jabbed a finger at the air. In his other hand he was holding a digital tablet.

“Magnet,” said Pritchard. “The top dog of the Motor City Bangers, in the very unpleasant flesh.”

As he watched, Jensen saw Magnet aim a kick at the wheels of the barrow and he caught a snatch of swearing as the gang leader berated the younger member. The MCB pushing the barrow left it behind and sprinted back off into the storage racks, while Magnet turned his attention fully on Cali. He pointed at some of the crates and shook his head, instead jabbing his finger at others that hadn’t yet been loaded.

“He’s got himself a shopping list,” Jensen thought aloud.

“That’s not all,” added Pritchard. “I’m reading another encrypted signal in your area, tagged on an infolink channel. Someone is speaking to Magnet directly through a mastoid com implant, just as I’m talking to you.”

That confirmed the suspicion that had been forming in Jensen’s thoughts since the start. While the MCBs clearly had ambition beyond their station as just a street gang, it didn’t track that a group like them would be players in the theft and sale of prohibited human augmentation technology. “Whoever is on the other end of that infolink conversation is the one holding Magnet’s leash,” he said. “Pritchard, can you back-trace the signal, find out where it’s coming from?”

The hacker’s reply was predictably terse. “What do you think I’m doing?”

“Hey,” whispered Stacks. “A lot of trouble waitin’ to happen down there, Jensen.” His tone began to rise, taking on a fearful edge. “You mind telling me how we’re gonna puh-put all this hardware outta action, without getting lead-lined? Huh?”

“Keep it together,” Jensen said firmly. “There’s a way. But it’s a little showier than what I’d hoped for…” He paused, scanning the warehouse. The scavenger had been right, there was an army of them down there. Far too many for two men to take on directly. “Pritchard, check the blueprints. I need you to find me an access shaft down to the sub-basement. The main utilities conduit.”

“Working on it…” A moment later, an icon blinked into existence on Jensen’s retinal display. “Waypoint uploaded. That’ll take you to it.” He paused. “I see what’s down there, so I think I know what you’re planning. And it’s idiotic.”

“Didn’t ask your opinion,” he retorted.

“What?” Stacks shot him a nervous look.

“Follow me,” Jensen told the other man. “I’m gonna need that muscle of yours.”

* * *

In the end, it took both of them to force open the doors to the service shaft that dropped down into the darkness. Jensen pushed through the gap and found a ladder that allowed him to descend quickly and quietly. Stacks followed, grimly moving down one rung at a time, hand over hand.

There was little light, but his smart vision mode got past that problem, the Eye-Know optics rendering the area in a grid of geometric shapes that he could navigate easily. He glanced over his shoulder. “Still with me?”

“I gotta choice?” grumbled Stacks. He followed as Jensen moved on, but he was flinching at every echo of noise from above them, every knock and thud of the pipes that lined the sub-basement floor.

Jensen quickly found what he was looking for. Set into the pipes were a series of smaller branching conduits and a regulator mechanism studded with valves. He tested one experimentally. The wheel atop the valve moved a fraction and then stuck.

“I need you to throw this open,” he told Stacks. “All the way. Can you do that?”

The other man peered through the dimness at the regulator, seeing the warning plate bolted to the pipe that specifically said not to do what Jensen was asking. “Are you c-crazy? This here’s a gas main. If there’s anything still flowing through it—”

“There is.” Jensen cut him off, tapping on an old-style gauge that had a needle gently twitching in the lower ranges of its dial. “Not full on, but enough.”

“Oh, man.” Stacks raised his hands to his face, clasping it between his spindly augmented fingers. “You wanna cause a leak, blow this place to hell? How you gonna do that?”

Jensen reached into a pocket on his tactical vest and produced a flexible rectangular pack filled with a blue gel. “This is a remote-detonated explosive. We plant it, get the hell out and then…” He spread his hands.

“That’ll bring the whole building down on the heads of those idiots upstairs.”

Jensen nodded. “That’s the idea.”

Stacks’s hands were trembling, so he knotted them together. “And you’re okay with that?”

Jensen’s jaw hardened. “You want to go up there and ask them real nice to put those augs back where they found them?” He frowned. “If you’ve got another way to stop them walking out of here with that tech, let’s hear it.”

“I… I guess not.” Stacks gave a doleful nod. “All right then. Step back, let me do it.” Clasping the valve wheel, he gave a deep grunt and turned it. Stacks’s aug arms juddered as he applied more force to the action, and then suddenly the valve failed catastrophically. The wheel snapped off in his hands, taking part of the mechanism with it.

Jensen immediately caught the stink of gas from the fractured pipe, and he tossed the explosive pack down next to it. “Okay, we gotta book, now!”

But they were only a few steps away from the maintenance shaft when voices echoed down to them from the upper floor. Jensen pushed Stacks back to the wall as a flashlight beam stabbed downward, followed by a gob of thick spittle as someone spat down into the gloom and laughed.

“Pritchard, our way out is compromised,” whispered Jensen. “Need an alternative, now.”

“Hey, whatssat down there?” called a voice from above.

As he pulled Stacks away, Pritchard’s voice sounded through Jensen’s bone-induction transceiver. “According to the building plans, five meters to your right is a crawlway that should take you up to an access channel underneath one of the materials recycling bays.”

“Copy that.” The acrid taste of the gas was gathering at the back of his throat. “Stacks, this way.”

“I hope you… know what you’re doing, man.” Stacks coughed and fell in step with him.

* * *

Later, Jensen would reflect on the thought that here was where everything started to fall apart.

Yanking open the vent concealing the other shaft, he didn’t waste any time climbing up and through. As Jensen ascended back toward ground level, he felt the crawlway shake and creak as Stacks forced his way up behind him. It was a tight fit for both of them, and the other man’s thick cyberlimbs scraped along the inside of the metal walls. He thought he heard Stacks muttering under his breath, like he was talking to someone only he could hear. Pritchard’s warning about stability echoed in Jensen’s thoughts.

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.

Magnet cocked back his heavy cyberlimb, activating a piston accelerator in the forearm that turned it into a fist-sized battering ram. With a massive crash, he punched clear through the nearest wall and threw himself through the gap into the adjoining office.

Jensen ran after him down the corridor, as Magnet repeated the action over and over. The two men exchanged fire through windows and open doors as they ran, shot and bullets cutting through the smoky air. Belatedly, the damaged fire suppression system activated and sprinklers in the ceiling came on, instantly drenching everything in a hissing downpour.

“The only way out is past me,” Jensen shouted. “Toss your gun and you can still walk out of here!”

Magnet’s answer was another salvo of shotgun blasts that chewed great divots out of the walls around Jensen. He broke cover and kicked open an access door that led to the roof, vanishing through it before Jensen could draw a bead.

“Where the hell is he going?” Jensen muttered.

Pritchard’s voice buzzed in his head. “Something’s going on out there. I’m reading disruptions in what’s left of the local data grid… This isn’t the MCBs, Jensen, there’s another hacker…”

He didn’t have time to acknowledge the message. Every moment he hesitated, Magnet would extend his chance to escape and the truth about what was happening in Detroit would be lost. Jensen steeled himself and kicked open the access door, ready to duck back inside if Magnet was lying in wait. But instead, he saw the gang leader running along an elevated catwalk toward the rear of the warehouse, where a sky bridge connected it to the rest of the manufacturing plant. His escape route.

If Magnet made it across and down into the back alleys of Milwaukee Junction, he was as good as gone. Ignoring the plumes of smoke rising up from the skylights, and the dangerous creaking of the fracturing roof, Jensen let the Hurricane drop on its sling and sprinted after Magnet, the synthetic muscles in his augmented legs reconfiguring into sprint mode for maximum speed across the short, straight-line distance.

He was on the gang leader in a heartbeat, kicking off a guide rail to propel him up and then back down. Magnet whirled, firing as he moved, and a hot gush of exhaust gas seared Jensen’s face as the blast narrowly missed taking his head off. He landed a powerful blow on Magnet’s shoulder where his aug arm connected to his torso, and the shock of impact knocked them both apart again.

Jensen recovered faster, reacting with reflex-boosted instinct, and slapped away Magnet’s weapon. The Widowmaker spun over the guide rail and skidded away across the sloped rooftop. The gang leader staggered back, triggering the heavy-punch piston again, cocking it to throw a strike at Jensen’s head – but his opponent’s arm bent back on itself in a move that no human limb could have made, snatching at the grip of the dangling machine pistol.

The Hurricane came up to aim at Magnet’s broad chest and Jensen blew out a breath. “End of the line,” he snarled. “I want to know who is running you.”

“Man, screw you,” Magnet retorted. “No-one runs the Bangers but me!”

“Jensen…” Pritchard’s voice carried a distinct note of fear. “They’ve got the trucks moving… They’re clearing out!”

He ignored the hacker for the moment, concentrating on his improvised interrogation “Who told you to get the augs? Where are you taking them?”

“Goodwill,” spat the ganger.

Jensen shook his head and he went for a different approach. “Try again. You’re just punks with big mouths and poor impulse control. You’re not smart enough to shift gear like this on your own… Or are they playing you? Did the man in charge tell you what it’s really worth?”

His ploy worked, and for a moment a flicker of doubt crossed Magnet’s face. “Ain’t no man in charge, asshole…” He straightened. “Shoot me, if you gonna do it.”

“Jensen!” This time Pritchard’s shout couldn’t be ignored. “Listen to me! You’ve got company!”

From out of nowhere, a thunderous downdraft blasted across the roof, spinning the plumes of smoke into vortices, and both men staggered beneath the blasts of hot exhaust fumes. Jensen reacted without thinking, looking up just as a blazing spotlight snapped on, drenching the surrounding area in white light and hard-edged shadows. The anti-glare coating of his eye shields lessened the effect, but it was still dazzling. He made out the shape of a bulky, drum-shaped VTOL suspended on four tilt-thrusters at the end of stubby winglets, turning slowly against the night sky.

Magnet saw the opportunity and made use of Jensen’s distraction, scrambling to his feet, up and over the rail. Jensen saw him move and went after him, skidding across the corrugated metal of the roof – but the gang leader was already out of his reach.

Without hesitating, Magnet threw himself off the ledge and into a three-story fall straight toward the tarmac below. The fall would have left anyone else shattered and broken, but an instant after the gang leader dropped away, a glowing sphere of electromagnetic force flashed into existence around him and slowed his descent enough to let him hit the ground and survive. Like Jensen, the MCB’s augmentations included an Icarus implant, a technology originally developed for military use to assist in high-altitude low-opening parachute jumps. Magnet was right at the edge of the aug’s operational envelope and he landed badly, but still well enough to stagger away. Jensen swore as one of the six-wheeler trucks he had seen in the loading bay slewed around to pick up the gang leader.

But before he could react to that, the lights from the heavy VTOL overhead shifted around him as the aircraft moved and a cluster of drifting, wavering crimson dots appeared on his chest and throat. The VTOL dropped until it was level with the roof, and he saw that it was a cargo-carrier model, the central section a square metal container with sliding panels open to the air. Figures rendered into black shadows by the backwash of the spotlight were aiming angular weapons in his direction.

He hesitated, his finger on the Hurricane’s trigger but the weapon’s muzzle aiming at the roof beneath his feet. Jensen knew that if he moved, a dozen guns would cut him down in an instant. The fact that the new arrivals hadn’t immediately opened fire made him suspect there was more going on than he knew.

Three figures in black leapt from the VTOL’s crew bay to the rooftop, and they came into the light with flechette rifles raised, the muzzles of the FR-27s and their laser sights all tracking together. The closest to him was a blonde woman with an athlete’s build and sharp European features, and as she stepped forward, she cocked her head and subvocalized something. She was talking on another infolink channel. Jensen remembered Pritchard’s earlier warning.

For a long second, it seemed like the woman was going to execute him then and there, but then her expression shifted into something like weary resignation. “Police! Lose the gun!” She shouted the words so he could hear her over the constant rumble of the VTOL thrusters. “Put up your hands, unless you want to stay here and burn to death!”

They carried themselves like professionals, Jensen noted. This crew were way past the random, thuggish threat of Magnet and the MCBs – and so they were a lot more dangerous.

Jensen nodded, as if he was going to comply, but in his mind the exact reverse was his intention. He peered at the roof beneath his feet, using the micro-miniature t-wave lenses in his smart-vision optics to see through the thin metal to the gantries and floors below. “Pritchard,” he muttered, his words drowned out by the engine noise. “I got a situation here.”

“I know. I was the one who told you, remember?” The hacker’s nasal sneer made his jaw itch. “I’m going to distract them. There’s a sewer tunnel under the southwest corner of the building. How you get from where you are to there, I can’t help you with.”

“Last chance!” shouted the woman. The red thread of the targeting lasers lifted to dance across his eye shields.

In the next second, an ear-splitting shriek of feedback crashed over the infolink and Jensen cried out in pain. It was as if someone had jammed a spike into his skull, and he staggered with the force of it – but so did the woman and her companions, and the effect must have been felt by the VTOL pilot as well, as the spotlight suddenly blurred away as the aircraft rolled to the left before abruptly course-correcting itself.

Jensen gritted his teeth and unloaded a full clip of bullets from the Hurricane into the roof, cutting an arc through the corrugated metal. Already weakened, it gave way like a trap door and he fell into a haze of hot, choking smoke.

Gunshots followed him into the raging fire, but Jensen was already gone, vanishing into the flames.

SEVEN

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