US ARMY RAIL TRANSPORT 995 – MICHIGAN – UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

The first inkling the team at the front of the train had that something was wrong was a clanking noise from the deck beneath their feet. Agent Doe was a First Nation ex-patriot with a high black topknot and a suite of advanced neural implants, and she slipped off the crate she had been sitting on and crouched low to the floor. “You hear that?” she asked the others.

Away at the top end of the cargo wagon, where a connecting door led to a crew car behind the locomotive leading the train, the noise sounded again and Doe drew her sidearm.

“You want me to call it in?” said one of her colleagues. “Vande will be pissed if we break comm protocol for nothing.”

“If it’s nothing,” said the woman, striding down the length of the long car. She reached the door and slammed the heel of her hand on the panel that would open it.

The metal door slid aside, and standing directly behind it was a shadow with dark, light-absorbing skin. In its hand was a wide, diamond-shaped push dagger that shot out and hit Doe in the throat and chest a half-dozen times before she could cry out. Gushing blood, the agent stumbled forward, her gun clattering away. Her killer grabbed her before she could fall, spinning her around as another hand came up with a large-frame Steiner-Bisley semi-automatic in it. The heavy pistol was doubled in length by a fat sound suppressor on the end of the barrel.

Pulling Doe close as a human shield, her killer advanced into the cargo wagon followed by two more featureless black-clad figures, each of them like pieces of the night given form and will. Other guns came up as Doe’s teammates drew down, but shots were already in the air. Subsonic armor-piercing .45 caliber rounds hit the Task Force agents in perfect double-tap groupings.

When they fell, Doe’s killer allowed her to collapse as well, and he stood aside as his comrades moved up, watching them pause to shoot the other two agents in the head, to be certain they would not rise again.

The killer tapped a key on the palm of his glove, sending three clicks of static over an encrypted channel.

* * *

“Forward car is secure,” Thorne subvocalized, watching as the last of her squad climbed up through the ragged hole in the floor and into the trailing carriage of the train. “Three kills.”

“Half of them terminated already,” said the hulking cyborg, in a manner that might have been disappointment. “I will neutralize the remainder.”

The members of the military train’s duty crew – two engineers and two soldiers – were already lying dead in a heap at the far end of the compartment. Silenced shots and close-quarter kills had seen an end to them in short order.

“This isn’t a game,” Thorne told him, looking up to stare the machine-man in the face. “We’re not here for you to score points.”

The lenses of his glassy eyes shifted slightly to focus on her. “Stay out of my way,” he warned, and advanced to the forward door. It slid open before the cyborg, revealing a line of two flatbed wagons between the rear car and the next cargo carriage. The sharp-sided shapes of denuded, wingless aircraft fuselages sat across the flatbeds beneath the flapping tarpaulin covers and heavy hawsers that held them in place. The cyborg set off, moving ahead without looking back.

The tall, thin operative with the sword-blade legs shot Thorne a look. “Don’t sweat it. The German gets twitchy if he can’t get his hands dirty,” he said, raising his voice over the rush of wind through the open door.

She nodded at the dead men. “What do you call that?”

“Just warming up,” he noted, and set off after the cyborg.

* * *

“We’re here,” called Vega, as she pulled the VTOL into a hard turn. “I got the bird in whisper mode so we’re ghosting… But I think I saw movement out on one of the flatbeds, so watch it…”

Quinn peered through a porthole in the door at his side. “Don’t take any chances, little sister. Get us up to the engine at the front and hold her steady.” He turned to Jensen. “Your show now.”

Jensen gave a determined nod. “Pritchard,” he muttered, triggering his infolink. “I’m going in. You read me?”

What came back was a scratchy, hissing tide of interference. Jensen picked out a few words from the hacker, something about ‘jamming’ and ‘disconnection’ before Pritchard’s faint voice sank entirely beneath the crashing waves of static. It seemed that he would be doing this alone.

“Udači,” said Quinn, reaching for the hatch’s release switch. “Come out of this alive, and I’m sure we’ll talk some more.”

The hatch retracted and a roaring gale flooded the compartment. Jensen snapped off the safety belt across his lap and went to the edge. Speeding along less than a meter below the belly of the VTOL was the top of the military train’s olive drab locomotive, a wide line of exhaust grilles and metal plating. Aside from a few running lights, the engine was totally dark. It had no human driver, controlled instead by a robot brain that saw through the night with infra-red and radar senses.

Jensen watched the rocking motions of the VTOL and the locomotive, timing the moment to the last possible second; then he was away, dropping the distance to land in a three-point fall on the midline of the engine. He found a grab bar on the hull and gripped it tightly before wind shear could tear into him.

The black-on-black VTOL whispered away, the hatch sliding shut until it was nearly invisible. Jensen watched it dip below a tree line and then it was gone.

Using the grab bar and others that followed a line astern, Jensen moved hand-over-hand toward the rear of the engine. He counted seven more wagons beyond – a crew car, three cargo wagons, a pair of flatbeds and a tail-end caboose. From his vantage point, nothing seemed awry, but the jamming of communications and the fact that the VTOL’s low pass hadn’t immediately drawn someone’s attention did not bode well.

Quinn’s words echoed in his thoughts. Exactly how Thorne and the Task Force fitted into this byzantine chess game wasn’t immediately clear to Jensen, but what he did know for sure was that the stolen Sarif tech was too dangerous to be allowed to get out into the world. The only goal that mattered to him right now was making sure those mil-spec augs were destroyed. The rest of it he would figure out along the way.

The tech was David Sarif’s secret legacy, and somehow Adam Jensen had taken on the mantle of responsibility for it. So be it, he thought, recalling his words to Pritchard. One last job for the boss.

* * *

There was a skylight in the roof of the next car along. Jensen hopped the gap from the engine and got the vent open as a low bridge loomed up out of the night. He dropped through and into the crew car a split-second before it whooshed overhead, red indicator lights across its length lighting up the air.

Drawing his pistol, Jensen advanced up the length of the wagon. Air was rushing through the train car, but not from the open skylight. He searched around and came across a ragged wound in the floor. A rough oval slice was missing from the deck, and through it Jensen saw a blur of dark ground whipping past. Discarded next to the damage was a laser tool and a heavy battery pack. He dropped into a crouch and tapped the edge of the hole. The metal was still hot to the touch.

A dull thud sounded from the rear of the wagon, and Jensen’s head snapped up. He raised the Zenith and advanced, closing in on the source of the noise. There was little illumination in the crew car, and oddly cast shadows fell everywhere, but he could see no places for anyone to be hiding.

Ahead was the door that led to the first of the cargo wagons. Jensen lowered his gun slightly and started forward again. It was exactly what his attacker was waiting for.

From the corner of his vision, Jensen saw a hazy orange shimmer as light warped and bent around an invisible form. He spun as the cloak of twisted radiance fell away from the helmeted figure in black, getting a momentary glimpse of four magenta-hued lowlight lenses set in a featureless blank mask.

The thermoptical camouflage dissipated and the figure threw itself at Jensen, a bright dagger snapping into place across the knuckles of their hand like a switchblade. Acting on pure reflex, he brought up his arms to block the stabbing motion and turn it aside. Artificial arms clashed with a dull clatter of polycarbonate and Jensen’s hand jerked. He let off a shot into the ceiling, the report of the pistol lost in the noise of the train as it thundered through a tunnel.

Darkness descended, lit only by pulses of light from passing warning lamps as they flashed by. In the strobing, staccato glow, Jensen and his attacker twisted and fought in dangerously close quarters. The wide dagger blade hummed as it cut through the air toward his throat time and time again. With each swing, Jensen tried to extend away, but there was nowhere to retreat to. Instead he went on the offensive, bringing down the butt of the pistol on the brow of the helmet. He smashed one of the quad-eyes and the attacker flinched; Jensen guessed they were neural-jacked straight into the overlapping mech-optics, and although there would be no pain effect, it was hard for anyone to have their eye – real or not – crushed and not shrink from it, even for a moment.

He saw the opening and took it, landing a maximum-force punch in his opponent’s throat, the impact shocking through the armored ruff around their neck. That wide blade came at him again, but he parried it and shoved his attacker off-balance.

The figure in black shot out a hand and tried to pull him close, grabbing at his tactical rig, looking for a gap between the armor plates to put the tip of the dagger. Jensen kept up momentum, knowing that to lose it would be to end this mission before it had barely started. They stumbled together in a ragged shuffle and crashed into the connecting door. The hatch slid open behind them and the fighters swung around into the next carriage.

Jensen had barely a quarter-second to grasp a snapshot of the interior – bodies and blood on the floor, another pair of black-suited assassins at the far end of the rail car among racks of crates and boxes – before his opponent reared up and butted him across the bridge of his nose with the helmet. Pain ripped across his face and one of his eye shields grew a jagged crack.

The other attackers reacted, one dropping into cover, the other releasing a burst of automatic fire from a silenced SMG. Caseless rounds whined and sparked off the racks along the walls, and Jensen used the distraction to knock his close-quarter attacker away, finally gaining the distance he needed. Jensen fired and the figure in black dropped to the deck.

The others came storming toward him, firing as they went. A hail of bullets tore up the interior of the cargo wagon, ricochets shrieking as they bounced off bins of scrapped equipment and other hardware on its way to be melted down.

Jensen put his shoulder to one of the racks and gave it a hard shove, dislodging a metal basket of splintered ceramic armor inserts. It landed with a crash on the deck, upending its contents, and he went with it, using it as momentary cover before launching himself at the other two attackers. He had to close the distance to them, use the confines of the cargo wagon’s narrow width to stop them raking him with more bursts of gunfire.

They were shoulder to shoulder as he dove at them, blocking his advance. Jensen swept up and threw forward his arms, as if he were about to punch both men at once – but instead he deployed the nanoblades hidden in his aug arms at maximum extent, and followed all the way through with a stabbing attack. The blunt edges of the monomolecular weapons skipped off hard polymer chest plates and found purchase in the seams of the Kevlar bodysuits beneath. Any cries of pain they gave were lost, trapped behind their soundproof helmets, and they collapsed atop one another, rapidly bleeding out.

Grim-faced, Jensen stepped back and studied his bleak work, spotting the bodies of three of Jarreau’s operatives who had died where they fell. In death, there seemed little difference between the two sides of the fight. Each were darkly clad, fearsome but efficiently anonymous in aspect.

Proxy soldiers, he thought, recalling something David Sarif had once said to him, a lifetime ago. All run by faces in the shadows. The thought sat badly with Jensen, and inevitably a question rose that he had no answer for. A question that had been playing on his mind since his reawakening.

Who is running me?

TWELVE

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