Glitch in the God Complex (AmpCore #1)

45 - The Last Stand of Cutter Jennings

 "GET DOWN!" Piper screamed as bullets started flying. Kirk dropped flat, and Arden followed him an instant later, squirming along on her belly behind one of the armoured crates.

All around her Cutter's guards opened fire, rifles blazing up into the rafters at the sea of baleful light coming from the wraiths. Then dark shapes were racing through the darkness, and people started screaming.

Piper squeezed her eyes shut for two seconds, sending out the pulse signal to the others. A moment later she felt the faint jerk as Arrow untethered from her visual cortex. They'd seen it all – hopefully they hadn't waited for Piper to call them to come running.

But until they got here, she was on her own in the middle of a warzone.

The sudden thunder of an explosion ripped through her ears and she twisted towards the sound, fighting to keep track of just what the hell was happening. A long thin section of the lower refinery wall burst inward, plating buckling and screeching under the force of the blast. She drew her amplifier and lashed out, deflecting a piece of metal the size of a dustbin lid away from her head. Not everyone was so lucky; one of Cutter's guards was almost shorn in half by a flying hunk of wall-plate, blood spraying across the yard floor.

And through the smoke and fire came a line of black armoured figures.

Confusion blazed in Piper's mind as she stared at the newcomers. It took her a moment to realise exactly what she was looking at, but then the gleaming rifles rose and more gunfire started spitting through the open space.

She pulled a barrier around her as the battle erupted. How and why the corporate soldiers and wraiths had gotten here didn't really matter now. Bullets clanged off metal stairs and pillars; people screamed and bodies fell. Piper flexed her implants, bending projectiles around her as she darted for cover.

Several of the guards were already dead, caught between the corp troopers and a tide of codewraiths rampaging through the upper rafters. Heavy metal shapes came plummeting down from the heights, smashing craters in the smelting yard floor as they landed. She skidded to a halt as one of them crashed to the ground barely ten meters in front of her.

Piper braced herself as the wraith unfolded. This one was a cumbersome monster, eight feet tall and stomping towards her on a tripod of legs. Its arms opened up, revealing two rotating cannons in addition to a pair of long, vicious blades. Piper she took her amplifier in both hands, winding back like a baseball player getting ready to crack a home run.

The wraith's eye clusters flared and it lunged, just as she swung. An arc of white hot fire burst free from her amplifier and cut the thing neatly in half at the waist. Then a bullet smashed of her barrier, ricocheting away off the floor.

Anger boiled in her veins as she turned to the corporate trooper who'd just shot at her. It coalesced then, that these fuckers weren't here to help deal with Jennings or the wraiths. They were here to try and kill her.

They're nothing compared to you. You can kill them all. Show the corporations what they should really be afraid of.

"C'mon then!" Piper screamed, her whole body lighting up like a sun as she face the corporate kill squad. She thumped a clenched fist against her chest. "Take your best shot!"

Break him, the voice encouraged.

And she listened.

Before the closest soldier could move another inch, she pointed her amplifier at him, and shattered every bone in his body.

The internal principle wasn't one she'd had a lot of practice with, but it was a discipline that was easy to use if all you wanted to do was hurt people. Using it to fix things was the real challenge. She just reached out, felt the structure of the soldier's body and cut loose, squeezing with every newton of force she could muster.