James Swallow - Deus Ex - Icarus Effect

They had never been here.

“We’ve been set up!” he shouted.

Rue de Lyon—Geneva—Switzerland

Powell’s voice sounded from Croix’s hand radio as they passed the Pare Geisendorf, heading east. “ The vehicle Hermann is driving has explosives on board. The Tyrants have put together a fertilizer bomb… They’re going to detonate it in the city!”

Croix swore. “That’s perfect. They blow up a piece of Geneva and then fake a claim from some transhumanist radicals; they get what they want and Taggart dies…”

“Where’s Taggart now?” Anna asked D-Bar.

The hacker hesitated again before he answered. “The, uh, hotel. The Metropol Grande, downtown.”

“The Grande has a large underground parking garage,” Croix went on. “A big enough explosion in there could collapse the whole building.”

“We’ve got to stop him now!” Anna snapped, working the slide of the Zenith. But Croix was already pointing down the road ahead. “He’s making a run for it!” Anna saw the van’s lights flare as it leapt away at high speed, jumping a stop signal, tires squealing as it veered past a car crossing the highway. Croix flattened the accelerator and the sedan surged forward.

“Floor it,” Anna snapped. “Get us closer!”

“What the hell are you talking about?” demanded Powell.

“We’ve got to get off this plane, right fucking now!” Saxon told him. “Namir and the others are somewhere else, bouncing the signal off the comm gear on board!”

“Why?” Powell shot back.

“They knew we were coming!” he roared.

Powell’s rifle was coming up, his face split with an angry snarl. “Did you—?”

But in the next second another voice was speaking over both of them. “Sir?” They both turned as Cooper backed away, his face pale. “Saxon’s right.”

The other man had bent down to open an access panel; concealed behind it was a fat brick of gray, claylike material, with a series of silver detonator pins wired into it.

Powell shouted into the radio. “All units, disengage, disengage, disengage—!”

The first of the remotely triggered charges went off at that moment, blowing the jet’s tail into a cloud of metal shrapnel.

A gust of hot gas and smoke came rolling down the length of the aircraft toward them as they ran. Inside the spaces of the fuselage, a second charge detonated, then a third. The churning inferno blossomed into a deadly flower.

Rue de Chantepoulet—Geneva—Switzerland

The two vehicles roared across the junction and cut through the sparse traffic, jockeying for position as they turned back toward the river. Taggart’s hotel was across the Mont Blanc bridge, less then five minutes away.

Anna shouted “Closer!” and dropped the passenger-side window. Her actions were dislocated somehow; it was as if she were watching herself from a long way away. She shrugged off her seat belt and dragged herself out the window as Croix brought the sedan alongside the van. Anna got a quick look at Hermann’s incredulous expression in the wing-mirror before she raised the Zenith and unloaded four rounds into the vehicle, aiming for the engine block.

The van skidded and recovered, turning as the feed lane to the Pont du Mont Blanc opened up before it.

The next thing she did was a moment of pure instinct, without conscious thought; Anna kicked off and threw herself at the van as the two vehicles bumped. Her foot found the running board and her free hand snagged the mirror. She ignored the winds battering at her and fired blind, shooting out the glass and firing into the driver’s side of the van.

Hermann shot back with a burst from a Hurricane machine pistol, spraying bullets into the air. His shots were wide; despite all his augmentations, driving the wounded vehicle, aiming, and firing at the same time were beyond him.

Her neurovestibular implant went hot and she felt the rush of new focus shiver through her; the feed-forward system augmentation tightened her aim to the point between the muzzle of the Zenith and her target. Anna let the ice-cold flood of her anger take over, let it ride the aim point.

Time slowed as the van hurtled across the bridge. Anna brought up the pistol and fired again. The shots struck Hermann in the head, carving across the front of his skull, ripping flesh and breaking bone. The impact trauma was massive, throwing him off the steering wheel.

The van skidded again and this time there was no one to stop it. Anna’s grip was torn away by the hard pull of gravity and she instinctively fell into a roll as she struck the highway. The pain was breathtaking; Anna screamed as the road tore at her, her forward velocity shed in agonizing impacts as she tumbled.

The van veered into the guide rail and cut straight through it, bouncing over the pedestrian path to slice through the side barrier. Engine roaring, the vehicle plummeted toward the Rhone river and clipped the rear quarter of a barge passing below.

As the van hit the water, something in the makeshift bomb broke. Perhaps a connector damaged by Kelso’s gunshots or a vital component short-circuited by the force of impact; the effect was the same.

The bomb went off in a howling, thunderous discharge of water and air, tearing the vehicle apart with the force of concussion.

Blood streaming down her face, Anna lurched to her feet as Croix came running. In the light from the streetlamps she saw the remains of the van spin into the froth of the river and vanish from sight.

Saxon heard Powell die as the last detonation took him off his feet and threw him across the hangar and out onto the runway. Powell’s scream was torn away by the roar of the fire and then Saxon’s world spun around him.

He landed hard, scraping his skin across the tarmac, pain lighting him up all over. The great ball of fire ejected a rain of steel fragments and burning debris, and Saxon dragged himself to his feet, trying to get clear. The heat rolled over him and he coughed, smoke and the stench of burning jet fuel searing his lungs.

He cast around, and his heart sank. Again… Not again…

No one else moved among the devastation and the flames; he cursed himself for being the survivor once more. Powell and his team were gone, the jet and any chance of finding Namir and the Tyrants obliterated…

Saxon stumbled and collapsed on the grassy verge across the runway. In the distance he could see the flash of lights from approaching fire tenders and police vehicles. He had to run. He had to get away…

His legs refused to move. How? The question thundered in his head, robbing him of all motion, all power. How did they know we were coming?

Kelso’s face blurred through his thoughts and he tensed. He had to warn her.

Saxon’s blackened, pained fingers found the spot on his jaw that toggled his comm implant. “Kelso…” His voice was a crackling, painful wheeze. “Kelso, do you read me? This is Saxon! We’ve been set up!”

For a long moment there was nothing but static; and when the reply came it was like a knife between his ribs.

“Ah, Benjamin,” said Jaron Namir. “I’m afraid it’s worse than you think.”

Pont du Mont Blanc—Geneva—Switzerland

Anna hobbled to the edge of the bridge and steadied herself with one hand on a piece of the broken guide rail. A layer of smoke and fumes hung over the Rhone, shrouding the damaged barge as it listed in the shallow swell. Small fires were burning where patches of oil on the surface had caught fire, and she saw indistinct shapes bobbing in a slick of wreckage. The damp air was cloying.