Crack in the Kill Code (AmpCore #2)

30 - Not As Dead as the World Would Like to Think

Holly stepped off the U-Rail carriage, the shock of Pardua's death still lingering in her veins. A cocktail of unsteady emotions rattled her implants as she started walking, keeping a wary eye overhead for corporate security drones. The datastream out here was patchy, firewall and pestkiller software in a constant chase to eviscerate the weed-like virus growths that popped up with increasing regularity.

She approached from the west, towards the part of the district Pardua had pinpointed that was on the outside of the cordon. Right now, the fewer security checkpoints she had to pass the better.

Squeezing her eyes shut for a second, Holly willed the image of her friend's body out of her head. Triggering an alarm-code for the local police was all she'd been able to bring herself to do before she bolted. At least he wouldn't be left there for long.

Anger rose to the top of her emotional cauldron then, as she trudged along a downward sloping street running parallel to the river. Somebody murdered her friend. The same someone who tried to kill her. The coincidence was too much. Her implants sizzled beneath her skin and she breathed deep through her nose, concentrating to maintain control.

Who are you? she thought. Who's out here?

The muffled pop of gunfire echoed from within one of the big buildings to her right – a gunnery arcade for the locals with a drunken, lop-sided crimson sign. She squared her shoulders and walked by, then on past a tangle of housing stapled to the side of a multi-store, a rancid looking diner, a boating supply store, a clanging garage filled with wounded, strung up cars.

There wasn't much here that looked out of place. Holly dredged the map image up from her mind again, and triggered her visor, risking a small connection to the datastream to pull a set of public street plans.

She overlaid the two. The dark sheen of the dead zone Pardua had found covered a small section of the streets, with the line of the corporate cordon stretching over about a third of it. Holly squinted, trying to decide where she ought to look. Whoever – whatever – had killed her friend, it had gone to great lengths not to be found.

"Where would I hide?" she murmured to herself.

Somewhere beneath the streets, but somewhere with the capacity to generate enough power to block out Pardy's signal trace. Hiding from the corporations wasn't something that just anyone could accomplish. She examined the city plans as she walked, sifting through construction and utility blueprints from half a dozen minor firms, looking for something that might fit the bill.

Three options presented themselves. Holly made an educated guess as to the best option, and turned sharply right, just as the lights of the corporate cordon on the docks came into view. A few drones whinnied distantly in the sky, but they were focused inward.

Perhaps wrongly, she thought. Shoulders squared and head down, she trudged through the narrow streets, heading towards the low, spined hulk of a Barrius Greenbelt transformer plant. A forest of masts speared up from it like some kind of monstrous hedgehog, their structures lit up by pulsating blue lights.

By all the reports, the plant was operational, sucking in solar, wind and kinetic discharge energy from the datastream itself, before funnelling the whole lot back into the Hadrian's voracious power grid. It wouldn't be a difficult matter to repurpose those masts, if an enterprising individual chose to do so.

As she approached, nothing looked out of the ordinary. The masts sizzled and crackled merrily, and she even spotted a few blue-overalled technicians strolling lazily around through the windows.

When she reached deeper with her AmpCore senses, however, she could sense something off. The datastreams flickered inconsistently, and a small number of the power masts presented to her as dead shadows. They weren't gathering in anything. Some of the others shone a little brighter in her vision. Compensating.