Crack in the Kill Code (AmpCore #2)

24 - Changing of the Guard

Mattise entered his office, his visor shimmering with fresh reports.

He did not like what he was reading. Things were spiralling out of control. No matter how many arguments he'd advanced for the continued confinement of Toran Knox and Vinder Tovas, the sheer weight of Hadrian's corporations had been too much to stave off. Too much funding would have disappeared, too many trade offs, too many conditions of restoring the board and tying his hands.

So he'd cut deals. He'd kept control. And then both parties had left the academy to do god-knows-what. Now Grennick Lanson had disappeared, which meant the full weight of Real-Raid was now sitting on his neck, not to mention the push and pull from Skiltron and Wayfinder, the main leaders of the two factions trying to exert control.

He felt like a father trying to keep fighting children apart at arm's length.

Sitting down, he poured a glass of crystal water from the decanter on the desk and sighed, taking a sip and swivelling idly back and forth in thought. The old board of AmpCore – many of them architects of that deranged venture that tried to create a new AI core – had turned their full ire upon him for having one iota of control taken away. Although there had been a handful of arrests, and a few carefully worded media statements about 'restricted technology' to cover up the bloodbath, he knew that the main players were still at large. Still sitting at the top of the pyramid.

Only his experience and bloody-mindedness had kept them at bay so far. He wondered how much longer that would hold out.

Taking another sip of water, he swept a hand over his computer control, bringing the film of glass to life. Academy statistics flooded down the screen, showing the rankings of the current crop of students. Twisting his hand in the air, he tugged Piper's record out of the morass.

She'd been making good progress until all this. At least, in some areas. She still lacked the finesse for proper internal principle work, and her atmospheric control remained dangerously volatile, as likely to cause an earthquake as bring some rainfall. But she was tough, resilient, and could level a skyscraper if you let her.

Frustration yanked at him. So much power in that body of hers, with those strange living implants that every corporation in the city wanted to get their wires plugged into. So many mysteries that they would tear out of her by force. Whether Piper survived the process or not didn't matter.

Despite his disgust at some of his fellow agents' butcher approach, their motivations weren't so different from his own. Where had her implants come from? And what was she truly capable of?

His thoughts wandered into the past, back to Niall Casimir. An AmpCore operative, Piper's real father had been involved in things even Mattise wasn't privy to, all those years ago when he'd still been mastering his implants. Blacktech, salvage work in Hadrian South, secret excursions into the deep and the dark. And then he disappeared. Vanished off the face of the Earth.

Dead. Probably dead.

Wherever he'd gone, his secrets had gone with him. While bad blood between the corporations was something he knew he could never truly solve, perhaps solving the mystery of Piper might help take some of the heat out of the conflict.

Mattise tapped a finger thoughtfully against his desk, then brought his visor back up, firing a call out into the academy datastream. The trace whipped efficiently through the torrents of information, staying below the nets of the official call logs. He smiled thinly. Easier to skirt security when you were running the place.

The connection linked. A face appeared; another AmpCore agent with a green and white Ventris Refineries logo printed on his jacket shoulder.

"Bannerman, it's Mattise."