Glitch in the God Complex (AmpCore #1)

18 - One Thing at a Time

What the fuck are you doing, Chloe?

She wished she had an answer.

Arden Russell's story was crazy. Just crazy enough to be true. Shit, she'd just watched a bunch of corp agents basically perform a heist on the local police. Was it really that far fetched that they wanted to keep this girl under lock and key?

And there was the matter of the sister – Piper. Still no sign of her, but according to her newest witness, Piper Russell was very much alive. Another corporate prisoner if Arden was to be taken at face value.

That, however, didn't quite sit right in Delgado's gut. She'd been a detective in Hadrian North for six years, and had plenty of run ins with the corps. They were liars. They were backstabbing bureaucrats, overbearing chaperones and patronising little shits most of the time, but what they never were was wasteful.

Locking people up and keeping them there could be very wasteful.

She puffed uneasily on a cigar as she guided her cruiser through Hadrian's street, the rear end weighed down by the bulk of the dead codewraith in the boot. She'd be damned if that corporate bastard Vendela was going to steal any more evidence out from under her.

The wraiths were on the loose for a reason, and everybody else deserved to know why.

Delgado swung them to the right, skirting the edges of Hadrian's dockside slums and following a broad avenue thronging with traffic despite the late hour. If she'd been following the letter of the law, she'd have taken Kirk and Arden straight to a cell and called whoever wanted to have them.

Instead she was about to violate her fortress of solitude for a couple of dock side waifs.

The old police kiosk looked as abandoned as could be. A little dark cube nestled amongst a crowded mass of corporate housing blocks, it had once been a little beacon of order in this part of the dockside sprawl.

But budgets weren't what they were. Consolidating local policing into single, larger units was the order of the day, and so places like this fell into disrepair. The people they used to serve just had to muddle along without, cutting deals with the gangs, cobbling together their own little economies of scrap, drugs, drink and weapons.

Delgado slid the car into dark crevice between the kiosk and the housing block next door – just enough room to spare for her to open her door. Leaving the shotgun in the passenger seat, she slithered out into the night. One hand was poised over her holster as her eyes flashed skyward, looking for any sign of corporate pursuit, but the air remained mercifully clear of corporate drones.

"Alright," she said quietly around her cigar, opening the passenger door. "Let's go. Quick now."

The two kids slid out to join her, looking like rabbits caught in headlights, eyes wide with unease. She couldn't exactly blame them for that, after what they'd seen. Delgado had raised the alarm on the murdered civilians, anonymously, knowing that if she tied herself to that location it wouldn't be long before the corps came knocking on her door.

The site would be swarming with corp security right now, searching for a codewraith that they would never find.

"Where are we?" Kirk asked.

"Old police satellite station," she replied, ushering the pair towards the door. "Shut down about five years back, but it's got its uses."

The keypad on the right of the door frame looked dead – she'd deliberately broken the LED display that would normally have lit the panel up years ago. When she punched in her access code, however, the locking mechanism retracted with a grinding hiss of metal on metal.