US ARMY RAIL TRANSPORT 995 – MICHIGAN – UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. Vande gave Chen the same look she always did – as if he was something that she’d scraped off the bottom of her boot – and she walked away down the cargo

Vande gave Chen the same look she always did – as if he was something that she’d scraped off the bottom of her boot – and she walked away down the cargo wagon. “I’m going to go check on the other team,” she told the tech.

“Missing you already,” he said. Chen couldn’t help it, the ironic comment came automatically. He heard Kastillo, the other TF29 agent in the carriage, give a low snigger.

“You know every time you talk to Vande like that, you’re just annoying her a little bit more,” he noted. “Knock it off, before she strangles you in your sleep.”

“Can I help it if I have a crush on our second-in-command?”

Kastillo rolled his eyes. “You know everyone else just thinks you have no idea when to shut up, right?”

“It’s part of my charm,” Chen insisted.

“No, it’s not—” began Kastillo, but he never got to finish his sentence. Without warning, the hatch leading from the rear end of the cargo wagon suddenly distorted in its frame as a massive impact slammed into it from the outside.

Chen and Kastillo went for their weapons by reflex, just as the hatch broke free of its mountings and was torn away. Ducking to stride through the low entrance came a massive augmented man, with unblinking crimson eyes glaring out of a dead, immobile face. Other figures were advancing up behind the invader across the flatbed cars beyond, but Chen only registered them as fleeting glimpses of shadow.

He raised his revolver and fired, just as Kastillo pulled his FR-27 flechette rifle to hip height and did the same.

The cyborg moved fast for his size, heavy footfalls clanging against the deck of the train car as he deliberately crashed through a support rack, sending containers spinning to the floor. Chen was sure he landed a round in the intruder’s chest, but it might have been a feather for all the effect it had. “Contact, contact!” he shouted, activating his infolink. “We’ve been boarded!” Static hissed back at him.

Kastillo was closer to the intruder, and he tried to put shots into the hulking cyborg’s head, but the rounds went wide. Then their attacker was on the agent, ripping the rifle out of his grip and smashing it to pieces against the wall. With his other hammer-sized fist, he slammed Kastillo back against a window, the toughened glass breaking with the force of the impact. Blood streaming from his nostrils, the agent reeled, dazed and disoriented by the powerful blow.

Chen couldn’t see Vande; was she still in the carriage with them? He had no time to look around for her, as the cyborg turned his attention in the tech’s direction, flexing his thick fingers as he stormed toward him.

The revolver bucked in Chen’s grip as he loosed off more shots that did as little to halt the intruder’s advance as the first one had. Whatever dermal armor the attacker had implanted in him was as tough as tank plate.

“Trottel,” snarled the cyborg from the side of his mouth. The word was foreign to Chen, but he could tell by the almost-sneer on that dead-eyed face that it was one of contempt. There was a black-and-steel blur as a fist came out of nowhere and the cyborg punched Chen so hard he left the deck and flew back with the force of impact.

The tech felt his ribs shatter, and the searing pain as jagged spars of broken bone pierced his lung. Tumbling to the floor, agony washed over Chen as he tried to drag himself away, back toward the next car. “Vande!” he cried. “I need some help here!”

The mech glowered at him, then turned away, stalking back to where Kastillo was slumped semiconscious against the wall. Other intruders in black anti-scan oversuits were filing in through the entrance.

The cyborg’s hand opened wider than it should have, fingers extending to envelope Kastillo’s face. Then it tightened, crushing the bones in his skull with deliberate, exacting slowness.

How did they make it on board without any of us knowing? Chen forced himself not to surrender to fear, trying desperately to grasp the sudden shift in events. How did they find us? The tech tasted blood in his mouth as a cold wash of dread reached deep into him. This is a setup! We were sold out…

Then Chen felt a hand on his shoulder, and looked up to see Vande standing over him with a silver pistol in her hand. “This isn’t going to end well,” she said.

* * *

The third car down from the locomotive was dead center of the train, and by Jensen’s reckoning, the most secure place to load the cargo of proscribed augmentations. He shouldered open the door at the forward end of the carriage and saw the stacks of familiar black hard case containers, the same ones he’d seen at the manufacturing plant in Milwaukee Junction. Each was held in place by magnetic locking clamps that would keep the cargo secure until it reached its destination.

The Sarif Industries logo was on every one of them, a mute testament to David Sarif’s endless desire to tinker with human enhancement technology. Jensen wondered about what had motivated the man. Sarif had always been an enigma, determined to chart his own course, outwardly a man with ethics, a genius with principles… Or had that all been for show? Jensen never once doubted that his former employer believed that he was doing what was right – but it seemed less important to Sarif what others thought of his intentions. His vision of an improved humanity, of a world where people could determine their own evolution, had been seductive in its own way… until you looked down into the gritty details and started asking the hard questions. If you could make a person run faster, think quicker, live longer, it wasn’t difficult to make them more dangerous as well.

And David Sarif was not the kind of man who would put aside a compelling technological idea just because it could have applications for war as well as peace. Jensen hesitated, looking down at the mechanical hands that had taken the place of the flesh-and-blood ones shattered two years earlier. He had never been given the choice, the chance to decide if he wanted to remain a flawed and broken human or become augmented with systems that had not only remade him, but forged him into a walking weapon. Not for the first time, a bitter kernel of resentment toward his ex-boss burned in his chest.

Jensen moved on; it would never be the time or the place to dwell on that. The moment of clarity he so badly wanted was still beyond him, still out of reach.

The hatch at the far end of the cargo wagon hissed open on its hydraulics and he snapped back to the moment, bringing the Hurricane TMP-18 to his shoulder in a firing stance. Jensen heard the low-pitched thud of a Shok-Tac stun grenade detonating, then the wild clatter of bullets bouncing off metal. Before the door was fully open, he saw two people come rushing through the gap, wreaths of cordite smoke gathering in with them.

In front was one of the operatives he’d seen before at the TF29 staging post on the barge, the field technician with the cocky smirk. The man wasn’t smirking now. Pale and bleeding, he was moving in great pain. Shoving him through the gap in the door was Jarreau’s cold-eyed second-in-command, the blonde woman he called Vande. She had a gun in her hand and a clinical, determined look on her face.

Vande hit the control to close the door again before Jensen could make out who was coming after them, and then she barked a command at the tech. “Get it done!”

“I…” The tech – Chen, that was his name – coughed wetly and spat blood. “Ah shit, I don’t think I can—”

Vande came to him and poked him in the face with her silver-plated semi-automatic, cutting him off in mid-speech. “I gave you an order! Do it now or I will put you down before they get the chance!”

Chen nodded weakly, staggering away to a control panel on the wall, dragging an override module from a pouch on his bloodstained gear vest.

Jensen took a breath. What the hell is happening here? Every other Task Force agent he had seen on the train up until this moment was dead, and his fear that he had arrived too late to warn Jarreau’s people seemed to have been borne out – but now here was the team leader’s second, threatening one of her own men at gunpoint.

His thoughts raced. From the moment Vande had entered the cell on the barge, Jensen had been wary of the Interpol agent. At first he thought it was natural animosity spinning out of their first encounter on the roof of the Sarif manufacturing plant, but now he was wondering if there was more to it. Whereas Jarreau had been willing to give Jensen the benefit of the doubt, Vande had made no secret of the fact she disliked him on sight, and pressed for his arrest. He never got the sense it was a good cop, bad cop thing. Vande’s contempt was the real deal.

But was it something other than a gut feeling on her part? Did she really know what he represented, what he’d done?

The replay Jensen had seen in Wilder’s memory buffer confirmed without question that TF29 had been penetrated by the Illuminati, and he knew how they worked. The shadowy cabal wouldn’t just have people at the highest levels, they would place their agents on the ground as well. They’ll have a traitor in the room.

He stepped out from behind the racks of black crates, holding the machine pistol on Vande. “Nobody move.”

The woman saw him and spun around, drawing a second pistol by reflex. Vande’s eyes widened as she recognized Jensen’s face. “Verdomme…” The momentary surprise switched to annoyance and she pivoted, one gun aiming toward Jensen, the other in the direction of Chen and the door. “How are you here?” Vande demanded. “You’re a part of this? I should have known!”

“Guns down!” he snapped.

Vande swore at him and shook her head, the air of wintry calm she had shown back in Detroit evaporating into real anger. Her gaze flicked to the technician. “Chen! Do it! Access the lockdown, now!”

“No!” Jensen took a step toward Chen, but Vande blocked his way.

Still holding one of the guns on him, she fixed Jensen with a hard glare. “Don’t test me. Come any closer and I will ruin that pretty head of yours.”

Chen coughed again and then the device in his hand let out a loud chime. “Got… it…” He wheezed and spat. “Activating…”

Jensen expected to see the mag-locks holding the SI crates release, but instead Chen’s actions activated a different system. Armored metal slats dropped down over the windows and restraint clamps clunked into place around the access hatches at either end of the cargo wagon. Vande hadn’t ordered the tech to open the containers; she’d ordered him to seal them inside the train car.

Chen’s labored breathing was coming in ragged, panting heaves and he dragged himself across to the far side of the compartment. He almost collapsed atop a low crate beneath one of the shuttered windows, giving Jensen a bleary-eyed look. “This guy?” he gasped. “You don’t have… a ticket for this trip.”

Heavy blows echoed on the other side of the sealed hatchway, quickly followed by gunshots ringing off the metal door. Then there was silence, and Vande dared to take a step toward it, listening intently. “They’ll be through as soon as they figure out how to bust in here without blowing the train off the track.” Her guns remained steady.

“I took out a team in the front carriages,” began Jensen. “They had a laser cutting rig. Odds are your friends on the other side of that hatch will have one as well.”

“My what?” Vande’s eyes narrowed. “You appear out of thin air with a weapon in our faces and you’re implying I’m in on this attack?” She grimaced. “I have shot people for lesser insults than that.”

“It’s true.” Chen gave a weak nod. “I’ve seen it.”

“I came here to warn you,” said Jensen. “After what happened at the airport, I uncovered a new lead… a woman called Jenna Thorne. Know the name?” He subtly activated his CASIE implant, using the aug’s built-in lie detector to monitor the two TF29 agents for any sign of recognition. The software registered nothing. “She’s Homeland Security, but that’s just a cover. My guess is she’s working for the people bankrolling the smuggling network that TF29 have been chasing. They want this hardware, and after you guys stopped them airlifting it out of Detroit… they’re taking a more proactive approach to recovering it.”

Vande risked a glance over her shoulder. “This Thorne… she’s one of them?” A thin wisp of white smoke curled from one of the lockdown clamps around the hatch, and the metal began to turn red-black with heat. “You were right. They’re burning their way in.”

“Yeah.” Jensen made a judgment call and let the Hurricane’s muzzle drop. Had he been wrong about the Interpol agent? Wherever Vande stood in this situation, he would find out for certain in a few minutes. “So I guess we’re in this together.”

To his surprise, the TF29 agent lowered her pistols and set about reloading them. “Our comms are being jammed. We’ve already missed a check-in, so Jarreau will have someone on the way to find out why… but they won’t reach us in time to make a difference. If you really are here to help, Jensen, I hope that means you were smart enough to bring some back-up.”

He shook his head. “Just me. But there’s an aircraft on station nearby; if I can reach them, I might be able to get us out—”

“And let this be stolen again?” Vande gestured at the crates. “No. These intruders are professionals – we retreat now and they win. They’ll have a pick-up already dialed in, count on that. And after all the blood we shed to get this junk, I’m not about to just hand it over.”

“What about him?” Jensen nodded at Chen, who grew paler by the moment. “He needs medical attention.”

The tech managed a weak grin. “I can’t l-leave Raye when she so desperately needs me.”

“You’re an idiot,” Vande told him.

Chen’s opportunity to reply was lost in the next second. The only warning was a brief clattering of metal on metal from across the side of the train car, close to where the tech was slumped. He reacted in alarm, but far too slowly to make any difference to what happened next.

A ball of fire tore through one of the shutters and the reinforced glass behind it, filling the front section of the cargo wagon with a brief torrent of heat and shrapnel. The blast – most likely from a remote-detonated explosive pack – ripped across Chen like a blowtorch, searing flesh to ash and bone to blackened ruins. He was dead before his body struck the deck.

A flurry of bullets followed as the shadow of a hulking shape appeared outside the great tear ripped in the side of the carriage, firing blindly into the interior. Vande was down, knocked aside by the backwash of the detonation, but Jensen was far enough away to hold his ground, and he let off three-round bursts, out through the ragged hole and into the howling darkness flashing past beyond it. He hit something, because the shooting stopped, although Jensen knew the respite would be only momentary. Over the scream of the wind, he could hear the sizzle and buzz of the metal latches around the sealed door melting into slag.

Two-front attack. They’re splitting our focus. It was an assault tactic right out of any counter-siege operations manual – and with that thought, Jensen suddenly realized what would come next. He surged forward, reaching out to pull Vande to her feet and away. “Get back from there!”

A trio of black-and-yellow cylinders little larger than a man’s fist came spinning into the cargo wagon through the blown-out window, and clattered across the deck. Ingrained reaction made Jensen turn his face away, shouting wordlessly to equalize the pressure inside his body as the concussive charges went off in rapid succession.

* * *

He lost long, precious seconds to the shock effect, struggling to pull back from the sickening disorientation that washed over him. The flash suppressor lenses in Jensen’s optic implants kept him from being blinded, but there was little he could do about the deafening whine from the stun blasts.

That he and Vande were alive was the only luck they had. Thorne’s killers could have tossed fragmentation grenades in after the shaped charge and turned them both into bloody rags, but clearly the intruders were not willing to risk any damage to the cargo.

Jensen stumbled, trying to shake off the stark jolt of sound and light, and grabbed Vande, hauling her up from where she had fallen. The TF29 agent was blinking, reeling, and two streams of blood trickled from her nostrils where the overpressure had hit her hard. She lurched into Jensen, unsteady on the continually oscillating deck of the moving train. He caught an expression of surprise as Vande’s gaze raked over his shoulder and behind him. She called out his name as a warning, but he only saw her mouth the word, his ears still ringing.

The laser burner had done its job and the hatch was grinding open in fits and starts. Jensen fumbled for his gun as the monstrous black shadow he had glimpsed outside the train car now filled the hatchway.

The big cyborg was a full-frame design, the class of augmented human that was known in military and law enforcement circles as an ‘ogre.’ Like the mythological beast they were named after, ogres were strong, tough-skinned and very hard to put down. Outside of national armed forces and certain sanctioned corporate military contractors, an ogre’s very existence was illegal. The United Nations classed them not as people, but as lethal weapons.

In it came, carelessly ripping through the frame of the hatch. Jensen missed the chance to fire off a burst from the Hurricane, but by the looks of the multiple entry wounds across the big aug’s torso, anything smaller than a heavy-caliber bullet wasn’t likely to do more than piss this guy off.

Jensen had been up against this kind of enemy before, but not in such close quarters, and not with another combatant in the kill box. He saw the hint of an icy sneer on the face of the intruder, and then a hammer blow came down, the force of it separating him from Vande with a single swipe. Jensen hit the deck and collided with a rack of storage crates, the painful ringing in his head gaining a fresh chorus of tolling bells. He glimpsed other black-suited attackers following the big cyborg into the compartment.

Vande tried again to get to her feet of her own accord, but the ogre put her down with an off-hand shove that threw the woman into a heap next to Jensen. Somewhere along the way, she had lost her twinned pistols, and Jensen saw his Hurricane lying just out of reach. Any thought he might have had of diving for it faded when one of the other intruders picked it up and pitched the gun away through the ruined window.

The lithe figure in black pulled back a form-fitting hood and a rush of henna-red hair tumbled out, framing a pale, unpleasantly memorable face. “I’m sorry I made you wait, Mr. Jensen,” said Thorne, her voice rendered dull and flat as the tinnitus effect began to wane. “But we caught up again eventually.”

“Long way from Alaska,” he managed. “Not far enough for me.”

“It would be a lie to say your appearance here is a surprise,” Thorne went on. “You have the singular ability to turn up exactly where you are most unwanted.” She frowned, as if considering something. “Perhaps that is what interests them about you.”

“Who would that be?” Jensen came up, dragging himself to a standing position.

Thorne ignored his question, turning to another member of the black ops team – a man with sculpted blades that replaced his lower legs – and pointed toward the panel that Chen had reprogrammed minutes earlier. “Can you take control of the train’s systems from there?”

The other operative nodded. “It’s only military encryption. I’ll take ownership of the network and then I can release the sealed hatches and cargo locks, re-task the locomotive…”

“I didn’t ask for a commentary,” Thorne spoke over him. “Do your job.” The hacker set to work, and she turned back to the cyborg. “Interpol will have reinforcements here in less than fifteen minutes. We need to be ready to take their VTOL when they arrive. Terminate the crew, but we must have the aircraft intact, are we clear?” The ogre acknowledged the order with a solemn nod, but said nothing.

“Huh.” Jensen gave a dry chuckle. “That’s how you’re getting the augs away, on TF29’s own VTOL. Smart. Because you knew they’d come running the moment the guard team on the train went off the air.”

“It is an efficient use of available resources,” Thorne replied. Behind her, the other operative did something with the panel and a tone sounded as the crate latches released in sequence. She nodded at that, and spared Jensen a withering look. “You, however… I consider surplus to requirements.” She raised her gun and aimed it at a point directly between his eyes.

“Those were not the orders.” The ogre broke his silence, a hard Germanic accent coloring his tone. “You are exceeding your authority.”

“It seems like a lot of people don’t like you.” Vande eyed Jensen and took a shuddering breath. “They want… you alive? Or some maybe not so much…”

“Hell if I know,” Jensen snarled, his anger rising sharply. “Shoot me or don’t, Thorne. I’m through playing by the Illuminati’s rules!” He tensed, ready for whatever would come next. I’m not going down without taking these creeps with me.

Thorne didn’t seem to be listening to any of them. She went on, speaking as if she were voicing her thoughts aloud. “The questions persist. What makes Adam Jensen different from the others who were fished out of the Arctic Ocean on that day? Why was he there? Who sent him?” Her dark eyes narrowed. “Think, Jensen. Ask yourself, what really drove you? What was the true, undeniable reason you went to Panchaea?” Thorne pulled back the hammer on her pistol, measuring out the moment. “And why didn’t you drown out there?”

There was hate in the words, and he couldn’t fathom why. Had there been some fragment of his memory that he had lost after the incident, something that Thorne was part of? Or had she known something about him all along, just as he had suspected on their first meeting? Some secret truth that even he wasn’t aware of?

“You tell me,” he said.

“You’ll never know,” said Thorne, with calculated cruelty and the briefest hint of a smile playing on her bloodless lips. Her finger tightened on the trigger.

“She talks too much,” Vande spat, and with a sudden blur of movement, the Task Force agent sprang off her heels.

The next few moments happened so fast, they were barely distinct events, each threading into the other; Vande barreled straight into Thorne, landing a hard cross on the woman that sent her spinning, the big cyborg snatching at her and missing; Thorne struck out with her gun and the revolver went off with a crashing discharge; Vande tumbled away, colliding with Jensen as he moved to grab her.

Blood grew in a great bloom across Vande’s belly, but she was showing her teeth in a savage grin. In her hand, she held the flat, slab-like shape of a Pulsar electromag grenade, torn from Thorne’s belt as the two women had briefly exchanged blows. She mashed down on the trigger pad and hurled it at the feet of the ogre.

Jensen acted on instinct, curling an arm beneath Vande’s and dragging her back and away toward the rear of the train car. He heard the EMP grenade detonate on an impact fuse, felt the buzzing crackle at the edge of the pulse flash as they threw themselves away from the area of effect. His vision blurred like a poorly tuned video signal, but the moment was fleeting as they stumbled out of range and through the hatch at the forward end of the carriage.

* * *

He let Vande fall, ignoring her cry of pain as she went down, and he bodily dragged the open hatch shut behind them. The magnetic locking mechanism thudded home, but he knew it would be no barrier to Thorne and her team now that their hacker had access to the train’s systems.

He went for the brute force option. Jensen deployed a blade from his right arm and slashed open the lock control pad in a shower of sparks. Without pausing, he reached up and cut off the head of the security camera over the doorway, blinding it.

“I… am…” Vande forced out the words. “Surrounded… by fucking idiots.” He looked back at her and saw the Task Force agent clutching at her gut, her gloved hands wet with her own blood. “So much so… I’ve caught stupidity off them.” She glared up at him. “Why else would I have done something like that? Tell me!”

“You saved my life,” he said simply.

“Was it worth it?” Vande spat back. She caught sight of the bodies of the rest of her team, the ones in the forward car who had been the first to be executed. “Shit. Verdomme shit. Seth’s gone, he was the last one… This is a stinking mess, Jensen.”

“I’ll get you out of here,” he insisted, pointing to the roof of the train car. “There’s a skylight up there, I’ll signal the pilot who brought me in—”

“I told you no!” she thundered. “Americans, you always think you know the only way to do things… No!” Vande pulled herself into a sitting position, and fumbled for a tiny .454 derringer pistol concealed in an ankle holster. “Listen to me,” she insisted. “Those bastards do not get this train, understand? They do not.” Her eyes lost focus for a second, and Jensen knew she was looking at something projected on to her retinal heads-up display. “This train will cross… cross the state line in about eight minutes, and when it does, there’s a curve… It will slow down.” She shook her head. “Speed it up. Faster.”

He nodded as he realized what Vande was asking him to do. “The train takes the turn too fast and it’ll go off the rails. Be torn apart.”

“And all that tech they want so… so badly will go up in flames,” she said with venom, glaring at the hatch they had come through. “Go do it. Manual override is in the engine’s cab.” Jensen opened his mouth to protest, but she swore at him again, her expression hostile. “Please don’t give me… some mawkish speech now. Don’t pretend we are friends just because the same bunch of assholes shot at us…”

“You want to die here?” he snarled.

“No!” she shouted back at him, slumped against the wall, clutching the derringer like it was a talisman. “But who says I get a vote?” Vande shook her head. “So get up there and kill this fucking train!”

* * *

“They’ve destroyed the door controls on the other side.” Thorne’s hacker scowled at the portable monitor mounted on his armored wrist-guard. “I’ll get the laser, we’ll just cut through again.”

“Do it. And in the meantime…” she said, with a sniff. Thorne looked across to the cyborg. “You. Do what you are best at. Find Jensen and the woman, kill them both. That’s a direct order.”

“It is contrary to what we were told—” began the cyborg, but Thorne silenced him with a savage throat-cutting gesture.

“Are you going to disobey me?” she said, as hard and cold as ice.

“No,” he replied, after a moment. The dead-eyed expression on his face never shifted. “But you will be held responsible.” He walked away, flexing his thick fingers experimentally.

“How do you expect him to get through there?” said the other operative.

“By the direct route.”

The hulking cyborg approached the torn-open hatchway at the rear of the cargo wagon and reached up, hands clutching at broken fragments of metal. With a grind of pistons, he hauled himself off the deck and on to the roof of the speeding train.

* * *

The locomotive’s cab was a sparse affair, a repeater console mounted in one corner of the compartment next to a tall server module behind steel access plates. The module controlled the train, sensing the motion and mass of the wagons behind it, managing their speed in real time as it sped down the rails at breakneck pace. On a display screen mounted beneath an armored window slit, a digital display showed a dozen virtual gauges and above them a rolling map. On the latter, the railroad ahead was visible as a narrow line growing into a steep curve that was coming closer by the minute.

Jensen looked around and found a set of emergency manual controls, a redundant system placed there in the rare event that a human driver would need to take over. The manual system was locked beneath a thick plastic shield that resisted his attempts to lever it open. Instead, he cracked it with the butt of an FR-27 flechette rifle he had found on the deck in the crew car, and the plastic fractured. In a few moments he had the controls exposed. There was a dead man’s switch, a speed governor, and a bunch of other dials and switches that he didn’t recognize.

He rammed the throttle bar forward to the highest setting and felt the train lurch as the engine put on a burst of acceleration. Red alert lights flashed, warning him to ease off on the power, but Jensen ignored them. He would have to jam the controls so the speed could not be reduced.

If in doubt, he told himself, break it. Jensen found the manual switches for the emergency brakes and fired a burst of rounds into the panel. More alarms sounded as he turned back to the main controls, ready to repeat the action.

But then the sliding hatch on the side of the cab squealed open on poorly oiled runners and a huge arm made of steel and corpse-pale flesh came through the gap, grabbing at him. The thunderous, constant bellow of the engine filled the compartment on a gale of damp air as Thorne’s pet cyborg squeezed in through the narrow hatchway. Arms swinging wildly, the ogre connected with Jensen’s shoulder and even the glancing blow was enough to make the motors in his cyberlimb stutter.

If it had been difficult to battle an opponent in the confines of the narrow train cars, then here in the locomotive’s cab it was like fighting inside a phone booth. There was no room to maneuver, and the long assault rifle in Jensen’s hand was exactly the wrong kind of weapon to use. He tried to bring it around, firing wildly into the ceiling, letting clusters of razor-sharp flechette rounds whicker and keen off the inside of the metal cab – but the big cyborg was too close, trying to back him into a corner.

“Ach,” muttered the ogre, as if he was disappointed with something, and he swatted Jensen away toward the rear of the compartment.

The blow kicked the air out of Jensen’s lungs and shook the teeth in his head, pitching him up off his feet and into a support frame. Agony erupted down Jensen’s spine and he belatedly realized that he had lost his grip on the rifle.

Burning through the pain, reacting more than thinking, Jensen shot off his feet and dove back at his opponent, deploying his nanoblades as he went. One snapped forward from across his knuckles, the other back from his elbow, and he pivoted in the tight space. Against an unarmored target – or even one with a standard Kevlar rig – Jensen’s slashing attack would have been deadly. But to his dismay, the tips of the blades skipped off the smooth ceramic-metallic plates that covered the ogre’s broad torso. Sparks flew and the monomolecular edges left scored lines across the armor without cutting any deeper.

“My turn,” rumbled the cyborg, and he backhanded Jensen into the control server. He lost an eye shield and for one dizzying moment, the power of the blow forced his optics into a rapid reboot, blinding him for a few milliseconds.

The ogre reached for Jensen as if he was going to embrace him, the mechanisms in his giant hands snapping open, widening so they could envelop his skull and crush it.

Again, Jensen did the opposite of what his opponent would expect. Rather than try to block the attack, he mirrored it. He grabbed at the cyborg’s smooth metal skull and dug in his fingers; the brief flash of shock on the ogre’s dead-flesh face told him he had wrong-footed the killer.

He pushed his thumbs into the center of the wide crimson lenses that covered the ogre’s eye sockets, and one of the dull plastic disks cracked under the pressure. The cyborg clawed at Jensen, trying to drag him off – but now he had purchase on his opponent’s right-side optic, and with a violent wrenching motion, he tore it out.

The ogre let out a low, sustained moan that carried over the rumble of the train, as the augmented eye dragged with it hair-thin lines of cabling and synthetic optic nerves. Bright blood and milky processor fluids drooled from the ruined socket.

For a brief second, fate allowed Jensen the fantasy that he had hobbled the ogre – only a second, though. “I see you,” hissed the cyborg, swallowing the pain.

The return punch was like a thunderbolt, and Jensen took the full force of it across his chest. He heard the brittle fracturing of his tactical rig’s polymer armor plates, he felt the sickly jolts of pain as his ribs cracked, all of it whirling around as the ogre’s angry blow threw him across the short span of the cab once again. Before he could react, the cyborg grabbed his ankle and pulled hard, pitching Jensen up off the deck and into the wall before letting him drop again.

His body felt like it was full of knives, stabbing and clawing at the inside of his torso. Icons from Jensen’s Sentinel implant flashed orange and red at the edges of his blurred vision, as the device went into overdrive and struggled to keep him from blacking out. His arm scraped across the floor and fell on something – the butt of the flechette rifle.

Jensen snatched it up and slid back against the rear of the cab, putting as much distance as he could between himself and the big cyborg. He raised the rifle, the muzzle wavering as the damaged servos in his arm struggled to hold it steady.

“That won’t be enough to stop me from killing you,” the ogre said matter-of-factly. “It will take something better than you to end me.”

Jensen’s lip twisted in a sneer. “Not aiming at you, asshole.” He squeezed the trigger and the rest of the FR-27’s ammo magazine discharged in a sustained snarl of gunfire, ripping across the train’s manual control panel and destroying it.

The locomotive shook beneath them and Jensen heard the screeching of metal far below as the spinning wheels bit into the curvature of the approaching track. A shudder ran down the length of the entire train and the cab rocked alarmingly. The cyborg looked around, taking in the damage. “You have turned this machine into a runaway. Foolish.”

“You think so?” Jensen got to his feet, letting the spent rifle drop. “The way I see it, you got one choice, big man.” He let his nanoblades extend. “I just turned your mission into a zero sum game. Time to exercise a little logic. Either we die together when this thing crashes, or—”

The ogre didn’t wait for him to finish. As cleanly as if he were stepping off at a station, the cyborg walked to the cab’s open hatch and dropped into the dark. Jensen rushed to the hatchway and looked out after him. He caught sight of a thickset shape picking itself up from the weeds along the railroad cutting, receding away and then lost in the night.

Beneath his feet, Jensen saw more flashes of bright orange sparks jetting from the bogies as the train’s braking system malfunctioned. The wind ripped the breath from his mouth and he cast a look ahead. In the distance, he could make out the vague silver lines of the railroad and their steepening curve. Beyond them was lost, decayed scrubland. At this speed, there could only be a few minutes until the locomotive left the rails and dragged all the wagons along with it.

Jensen tightened his damaged armor plates, flinching at a jolt of new pain, and started back down the train.

THIRTEEN

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