Crack in the Kill Code (AmpCore #2)

11 - Dataquake

Even the corporations couldn't clean up what had happened in the terminal. Not completely.

Most of the blood was gone, more than she could easily detect, but Arrow assured her there was plenty of residue in the cracks. They moved through the space with painstaking care, amplifier sweeping back and forth like an old-style metal detector.

But the groups' sorties didn't yield much that Mattellus couldn't already tell them. They knew about the barge, and they'd seen the cam-drone flythrough footage from the first corporate security team on site. Unsure what else to do, Piper found herself wandering the perimeter of the terminal yard, walking slowly through the scattered detritus of the docks while the others continued digging through the molecular aftermath of the killing.

She wasn't a scientist, and she was still honing the precision of her skills to investigate a scene to the same level as her comrades. Her accelerated curriculum at AmpCore could only compensate for so much.

Her eyes swept back and forth, watching the swirls of the breeze carrying shreds of discarded paper, food wrappers and cigarette butts out across the docks and into the river beyond. Piper walked, towards the Hadrian, and the dark ruin beyond it, her eyes narrowing. Sometimes, if you looked close enough, you could glimpse the metal things crawling in the darkness. Not tonight though. Tonight the shadows stayed silent.

Shaking her head, Piper sank down onto her haunches, examining the cracked and pitted concrete of the dockside. Gently, she brushed her fingers against it, trying to find something that could put them on the trail. Her mind taunted her, tracing monstrous footsteps in the broken stonework. Maybe some heavy thing had gone battering through the concrete, but how the hell would anybody know? Not for the first time, she cured the corps that had let this part of the city decay and die. Now, it seemed, they were reaping the consequences.

I feel something.

Piper froze, her fingers still pressed against the damp ground. She glanced back over her shoulder. Mattellus was nearby, wandering disinterestedly back and forth along the wall of the ferry terminal as he hunted for clues of his own. Staying crouched, Piper lowered her head and made a show of examining a divot in the ground.

Talk to me, Cassie.

The datastreams, they are warped.

What exactly does that mean?

Something very powerful passed this way. Powerful and angry. It is not deliberate.

So like... an angry aura?

That is a suitable analogy.

I don't feel anything.

I will show you.

Piper raked the fingers of her free hand through her hair uneasily, twisting at her long dark locks as she waited. Then she felt the twinge, a little jolt of discomfort right behind her left eye. It was like someone had used her face as a plug socket. She blinked and tried to focus, reaching out with her implants to follow the source of the feeling.

Suddenly she could see the data stream, the never ending deluge of code that blanketed Hadrian's streets. Even out here in this derelict slice of hell she could see it, thinner by orders of magnitude that what you could see in the corporate heart, but still enough to make the air shimmer with gossamer threads.

But it was what she didn't see that made more of an impact.

Out here there were no jammers, no EM fields, and no corporate harvesting hubs that would pull at the streams like planets with gravity. And yet, she could see the streams bending very definitely, twisting and warping along a very particular route. A ragged path of darkness stretched away from her, leaving mangled pieces of code in its wake.