Glitch in the God Complex (AmpCore #1)

68 - Hadrian's Reckoning

We can stop it.

The voice exploded in Piper's head, louder than ever before, like someone had screamed right into her ear with a megaphone. She let out a hiss of surprise, flinching violently and shuddering before she could formulate a response. Fresh agony flared in her back at the motion and she fought it down, struggling to her feet.

How? She asked it.

We have to talk to it. The wraith pods – link with one of them. Right now it can only see you as a threat. It needs to see more.

Piper knew there wasn't time to argue.

"Piper?" Odiye exclaimed, bounding over to them. "Are you-,"

"Help me," she hissed, grabbing his shoulder. "Empty chamber. Put me in."

"What?!"

"DO IT!" The words ripped out of her mouth in a scream, and that was enough to quash any further argument. With Toran and Odiye supporting her, she gingerly shuffled to the closest empty bay that had once held a codewraith.

When she was close enough. Piper shrugged off their hands and fell inside, looking around frantically for something to connect with, physically. The interior formed an array of status readouts, all of them currently in the red, indicating that the chambers former occupant was out there in the wreckage somewhere.

After a moment of flailing around she spotted a circular port that looked important enough to do the job – built into the back of the cylinder and about the size of a human hand. Reaching out with her amplifier, she ripped the socket out of the wall, exposing a tangle of sparking wires.

Sure about this? she demanded.

Yes. Connect – quickly.

Piper dropped her amplifier and grabbed the bundle of wiring with her hand, letting the electrical charge blast into her and link up with her implants. If a normal human being had done such a thing the voltage running through the system would probably have cooked them from the inside out, but Piper pressed herself against that flow, and began swimming upstream, hunting for the thing that so wanted her dead.

Come out, she urged. Speak to me.

Nothing.

She pushed deeper, fighting through an outpouring of raw energy that didn't recognise her. She didn't belong here – that much was clear. The data was an impenetrable deluge of code that her human mind couldn't process. Instructions for the wraiths, coming from whoever was controlling them.

Plunging further and further in, the voices of her companions faded away, their world losing more and more meaning as she dug around through the datastreams. In the back of her mind the lessons from her Logistic tutors slowly resurfaced, and she anchored herself against the port she'd come from, like tying a safety line around her waist so she could find her way back.

By the time she'd found what she was looking for, Piper had lost all sense of how long she'd been swimming in these datastreams. But there it was, right in front of her, a big, churning mass like some kind of kraken in the deep, broadcasting out those streams of code in all directions.

I'm here, she shouted through the ocean of data. I see you.

We see you, the voice added.

That seemed to punch through. The chaotic eddies of code stopped for a moment and the thing took notice at last.

Why? it said. Why are you trying to kill me?