James Swallow: Deus Ex: Icarus Effect

Saxon looked up and shifted the optics to low-light, instantly painting the whole sky in shades of dark green and glittering white. He caught movement as something ungainly and fast wheeled and turned above them. The wings of the drone changed aspect and folded close to the spindly fuselage as it dove at them. Saxon glimpsed a ball festooned with glassy lenses tucked underneath the nose of the robot aircraft as it turned to single him out.

He broke into a run and vaulted away over fallen tree trunks just as the clattering hammer of heavy-caliber bullets ripped into the place where he had been standing. Saxon rolled, hearing the deep report of the Diamondback as Duarte fired after the drone. The aircraft’s engine note throbbed and changed as it went up into a stall turn and came about.

“The trees,” Saxon shouted, working a dial on the grenade launcher. “Get to the trees. We stay in the open, we’ll be cut to shreds!”

Duarte didn’t reply; he just ran, as best he could, half-staggering, half-falling. Saxon looked up, finding the drone as it came hunting once more. He pulled the G-87 to his shoulder, almost aiming straight up, and squeezed the trigger. With a hollow grunt, the weapon discharged a shell in an upward arc. The dial set the grenade fuse for a half second, but even as the drone passed over him, Saxon knew he had misjudged the shot. The shell exploded and the robot flyer bucked from the near hit, but maintained its dive.

His blood ran cold as the aircraft put on a burst of speed and fell toward Duarte, like a cheetah zeroing in on a wounded gazelle. “Sam!”

The soldier twisted and raised the revolver, the bright stab of discharge from the muzzle flaring in the low-light optics. The heavy cannon, slung in a conformal pod along the length of the drone’s ventral fuselage, opened up with a sound like a jackhammer—and Sam Duarte was torn apart in a puff of white.

“Bastard!” Saxon rose from cover, screaming his fury at the machine as it looped and turned inbound once more, preparing to finish the job at hand. He broke out and ran as fast as he could toward the steeper slope where the trees were denser, the grenade launcher bouncing against his chest, his every breath a ragged, gasping effort. The cannon started up again as he reached the perimeter of the tree line, and Saxon turned as he ran, mashing the trigger. The remaining three rounds in the magazine chugged into the air one after another, exploding barely a heartbeat apart at a height just above the canopy. The drone’s delicate sensors were blinded by the flashes and the scattering of shrapnel, and it lost its target. The flyer drifted off course and clipped a tall tree; in seconds it was spinning and coming apart, shredding into a new firestorm of burning metal.

The detonation sent Saxon sprawling and he lost his footing. The soldier slipped over the lip of the hill and tumbled headfirst down the steep, crumbling face, bouncing hard. Unable to arrest his descent, he fell pinwheeling over the edge and into the muddy waters of the creek below.

Washington Hospital Center—Washington, D. C.—United States of America

Sensation returned to her by degrees, assembling itself piece by piece, line by line. She had the sense of being in a bed, the cotton sheets pressing against her legs, the prickly feel of the mattress cloth beneath. Her lips were cold and dry, a steady breath of oxygen flowing from a plastic mask resting on her face. Anna felt worn and old, broken and twisted. Her body seemed dislocated from her; she expected pain. Why wasn’t there any pain?

With difficulty, she turned her head on the pillow beneath it and felt warmth on her face. Licking her lips, she tried to speak, but all that emerged was a hollow gasp. It was dark all around her, a strange dimensionless void that she couldn’t grasp.

Then footsteps, people nearby. A voice. “Anna? Can you hear me?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, just lie still. You’re in the hospital. Try not to move.”

The oxygen mask was pulled away and she licked her lips. “Why… is it dark?”

“Okay, nurse, thank you.” Someone else coughed and she heard the familiar shuffle of expensive Italian loafers, a door closing. “Hey, Anna. It’s me, Ron. I’m here with Hank Bradley from Division. Just take it easy.”

“Ron?” Agent-in-Charge Ronald Temple was Kelso’s supervisor, a decent guy with a long career in the Secret Service. She hadn’t expected to hear him. “What’s wrong?”

“Agent Kelso…” The next voice was Bradley’s. Anna didn’t know the man as well as Temple, just by hearsay and reputation as something of a hard ass; he was a senior agent working liaison with the Secret Service and the Department of Justice. His presence underlined the gravity of what had happened. “I’m afraid we had to take your eyes.”

“What?” Her hand automatically reached upward. Pads of gauze covered her face, and in a sickening moment of understanding, she realized that the orbits of her skull were empty. Something hard and plastic protruded through the bandages from one of the sockets.

“We can’t talk like this. Wait a second.” Bradley came closer and Anna heard the whisper of a cable uncoiling. Something connected with a snap and she felt a sudden giddy rush of vertigo as an image exploded before her.

She saw a strange figure swaddled in bandages and crowded by electronic devices, like a hi-tech mummy. Monitors and an oxygen cylinder framed a bruised, puffy face. “I can see again.” The figure mimed the words as she said them, and then the point of view shifted, taking in Ron Temple at the window, framed by sunlight. His round face was tight with concern. “Me. I’m looking at me.”

The view bobbed. “I’m running you a feed from my optic implants,” said Bradley. A thin, brassy cable extended from inside his right-hand cuff and into a socket on the temporary eye interface.

“I look like shit,” she managed, swallowing a sob.

Temple came to the bed and perched on the edge, taking her hand. “Yeah, sweetheart, you do. But you’ll be okay. The doctors got the round out of you, it didn’t hit anything vital. Tissue damage mostly. The Kevlar took the brunt of the impact, slowed it down some.”

The next words fell from her in a breathy rush. “Matt’s dead. Byrne and Connor, too…”

Temple gave a shallow sigh. “Anna… They’re all dead. You’re the only one in the detail to make it.”

“We hoped Hansen, the Belltower guy, might pull through,” said Bradley. “They lost him on the operating table.”

“How long have I been in here?” She gripped Temple’s hand hard.

“Four days.”

“The senator?”

Bradley’s point-of-view nodded again. “She’s okay. We already got a statement from her. That, plus imagery from the traffic cams, and we’re assembling a model of the incident. But that’s why we had to subpoena your optics. You’re the only one who got a good look at a face. I had tech forensics from the FBI reconstruct a few stills from the data in the image buffer.”

“We’ll get you replacements,” Temple noted. “Good stuff, new Caidins or maybe Sarif…” He handed her a sip-bulb of water. “I’m sorry you had to wake up blind…”

“Thanks for being here, sir,” she said, taking a drink of the cooling fluid. “Has someone—” Anna took a shaky breath and started again. “Has someone told Jenny?” Jennifer Ryan was Matt’s wife of some sixteen years. They had two girls, Susan and Carole. She remembered their house as a warm, welcoming place.

Temple nodded gravely. “She knows. I’m sorry, Anna.”

“I understand you and Agent Ryan were close?” asked Bradley.

The other man answered before she could. “Ryan was her… mentor.”