Deus Ex: Black Light (Deus Ex: Mankind Divided prequel) E-Book

James Swallow

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

A brand-new official Deus Ex prequel, bridging events between Deus Ex: Human Revolution and the brand-new game Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. The year is 2029, and the promise of a new age of human augmentation is in ruins. Awakening in the aftermath of a changed world, augmented ex-cop and former security operative Adam Jensen struggles to find answers. In a world shattered by secrets, can the truth be brought into the light?

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Also Available from Titan Books

Title Page

Copyright

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also Available from Titan Books

ALSO AVAILABLE FROM TITAN BOOKS

The Art of Deus Ex Universeby Paul Davies, Jonathan Jacques-Belletête, and Martin Dubeau

Deus Ex Universe: Children’s Crusadegraphic novel by Alex Irvine and John Aggs

Deus Ex: Black LightPrint edition ISBN: 9781785651205E-book edition ISBN: 9781785651212

Published by Titan BooksA division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd144 Southwark St, London SE1 0UP

First edition: August 201610 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Copyright © 2016 by Square Enix Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided © 2016 Square Enix Ltd. All rights reserved. Developed by Eidos-Montréal. Deus Ex, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, Deus Ex Universe, the Deus Ex Universe logo, Eidos-Montréal and the Eidos-Montréal logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Square Enix Ltd. SQUARE ENIX and the SQUARE ENIX logo are registered trademarks of Square Enix Holdings Co., Ltd. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ONE

FACILITY 451 – ALASKA – UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

“How much do you remember?”

It was a woman’s voice, careful and steady, metered with just the right balance of maternal concern and authoritative firmness.

He opened his mouth to speak, but all that came out was a dry, papery rasp. It was difficult, as if the act of using his voice had become foreign to him. He gave up on the attempt and tried something else. He tried to focus on the woman’s words, to find her in the room.

“Take your time,” she told him – then an order, to someone else. “Give him some water.”

An infinite white space surrounded everything, blurred bright but without dazzling his eyes, and if not for the warmth and the stillness of the air he could have believed he was on some expanse of frozen tundra, stretching away to an unseen horizon. At the edges of his vision, trains of golden icons trickled down, vanishing one after another. He half-raised his hand to wipe them away, as if they were raindrops caught on his eyelashes, before remembering that they were being projected directly into his synthetic retinas.

The hand and the arm it belonged to ghosted up before him. Black as a shadow, the fingers moving, twitching. It fell away again, and he understood that he was lying in a bed, the pull of gravity holding him down. The tundra was a ceiling high above, out of reach, and by degrees he felt himself shifting upwards as a mechanism behind the mattress raised his torso to a shallow incline.

Other ghosts came into sight. The sketches of human figures.

He flinched at the sight of strangers, the echo of a fight-or-flight reaction triggered by something he didn’t immediately recollect. It was the dying ember of another memory, gone before he could grasp it. It left him unsettled and wary.

A robotic manipulator drifted closer, proffering a squeeze bottle of clear liquid, and he leaned forward to meet it, letting a nozzle hook his lip. Cool, fresh water whispered into his arid mouth, a faint medicinal taste washing over his tongue. It was like he hadn’t taken a drink in centuries, and for a long moment he just let himself enjoy the simple pleasure of it.

But then the flow of the fluid touched a different fragment of recall. Suddenly he was drowning in icy salt water, the cold filling his throat and his lungs, the impossible force crushing him like the fingers of a giant hand. He choked and spat out the liquid, gasping and retching, shock throwing him forward. Wires hanging from sensor disks on his throat and his chest pulled taut, others tearing away, sending contradictory signals to the monitoring devices crowded at the head of the bed.

A tidal wave of absolute panic crashed over him, the brutal and unstoppable force ripping away all his defenses, crushing his will in an instant. He knew that this was death pressing in on him, knew it without question because he had been through it before, more than once.

The first time, it had been a cauldron of razors and fire, ripping pieces of him away within and without, changing once and for all what he would be. He had survived that. Barely.

The second time, it was cold and pressure threatening to crush him into oblivion and leave nothing behind.

He remembered some of it now. Not a distinct chronology of events, not second by second, but flashes of action disconnected from one another. A random pattern of blinding, painful moments held together like pearls on a string.

The shrieking of tortured metal under the impact of a colossal volume of polar ocean. The wild screams of the mad and the dying. The thunder of his fading heartbeat. Lances of light through glassy, shifting waters. And a terrible knowing, a certainty that he would die out there and would stop that from happening.