Free Deus Ex: Black Light by James Swallow Page A

back into step with Stacks and Pritchard.
    “Just how much of this segregation crap is there?” he demanded.
    “It’s everywhere,” Pritchard told him. “I’ve heard talk on the net about so-called ‘safe harbor’ cities outside the US but I don’t know how true that is.”
    “This isn’t what I wanted…” Jensen said to himself.
    Stacks made a negative noise. “You and me both, brother.”
    “Down here.” Pritchard cut through a trash-choked alleyway, emerging behind a squat, slab-sided building with a partly collapsed roof. “This is it.”
    “The Rialto…” Jensen peered up at the darkened movie theater. “I thought this place had been bulldozed.” Faded billboards showing weather-stained posters for decade-old feature films hung on the façade of the cinema, and toward the front where the ticket booth had been there was only a portcullis of metal security fencing.
    “That was the plan,” said Pritchard. “But like everything else around here, the incident got in the way of that. It’s isolated, it has a power train good enough for my needs, and most importantly no-one bothers me.” They circled around to the back of the building. “Of course, it’s not exactly the Hilton-Fujikawa, but as I’m extending you the hospitality, you’re in no position to complain.”
    Jensen had been quietly taking note of the gang tags spray-painted on the walls since they had got off the monorail, his old cop instincts coming to the fore. When he had lived in the city, a street gang called the Derelict Row Ballers considered this area of Detroit as the buffer zone to their turf – but the DRB’s red diamond symbol wasn’t anywhere to be seen. Instead, Jensen picked out multiple instances of three yellow letters – MCB, the initials of the Motor City Bangers, the sworn enemies of the DRBs – scrawled in prominent locations.
    He glanced at Pritchard. “Since when has this part of downtown been Banger territory?”
    The hacker blanched. “Let’s just say they expanded their reach after the incident. With no serious police presence in the aftermath, the MCBs made their move. Their competitors are either dead or they fled.”
    “Yo, Snakey!” shouted a rough voice, and Jensen saw a figure climbing out of a car parked beside an overturned dumpster. The man was wearing gang colors and sported a pair of skeletal cyberarms. “You talking trash about us, man?”
    Three more gangers in MCB yellow got out and stood with him. They’d been staking out the rear entrance of the Rialto, and Jensen chided himself for not catching sight of them before they got too close.
    “Oh, crap.” The sudden shift in Pritchard’s body language spoke volumes. He clearly knew these men.
    “Friends of yours?” said Stacks.
    “Oh, we good buddies,” said the ganger with the aug arms, before Pritchard could answer. As he came closer, Jensen saw that he was missing an ear, the lobe replaced by the grille of a surplus military aural augmentation. He had to have been listening in on their conversation as they walked down the street. “Ain’t that right, Snakey?”
    The other MCB members sported at least one cyberlimb, mostly low-grade Tai Yong athletic models, and they all carried pistols in their waistbands. Jensen felt underdressed without a weapon of his own.
    “What do you want, Cali?” Pritchard feigned annoyance, but Jensen could tell he was worried. “I’m paid up with you people. We don’t have any more business.”
    “Oh, issat so?” The one he called Cali shared a snarling chuckle with his friends. “No, man, that ain’t the way it goes.” He advanced, and his gang mates came swaggering along with him. “See, Bangers run things here now. So you live on our turf, you a…” He paused, fishing for the right word. “A
tenant
.”
    Pritchard folded his arms. “I made a trade with Magnet,” he insisted. “Burned the police jackets on a bunch of those augs you’re wearing so the cops can’t trace them. In