Crack in the Kill Code (AmpCore #2)

33 - Everybody's Seeing Ghosts These Days

Holly's eyes widened and she recoiled as Lanson's body thumped wetly to the ground in front of her.

The young man had been virtually disembowelled, his ribcage exposed, the metal lines of his implants shining through the blood and gore. Her eyes moved unwillingly over the body, over the Real-Raid badge on the shoulder of the shredded AmpCore jacket, and up to the face, pale and twisted with agony.

Grennick Lanson. She swallowed hard and took another step backwards, power seeping into her amplifier. What had she found out here? Eventually she tore her eyes up to meet the cold crimson of the leader of these butchers.

"Who are you?" she hissed.

"Frankly, none of your fucking business." He slipped off of his crate and turned his back. "Bye, Holly. I'll catch you in the next life." As he walked away, he gave a small nod to the female cyborg. She pulled out a remote from her jacket pocket, and pressed a button.

Holly felt the single zip out of it, away from her and deeper into the substation complex. She braced, letting her power leak into the amplifier, a barrier sweeping into place around her in preparation for attack.

It didn't come. The codewraiths, robots and augmented humans just... melted away. She tracked them with her amplifier as they slipped away into the connecting passages, and her thoughts became a whirl of confusion. The cyborg leader's threat had been pretty explicit.

Then she was alone. The hair prickled on the back of her neck as she slowly rotated, amplifier raised to strike.

Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing.

Her brow furrowed. She took a step back towards the exit.

Holly felt the thing before she saw it. At first she couldn't figure out what her AmpCore senses had touched somewhere out there in the corridors. It was like a lump of lead moving through the datastream – a brutal, inert thing that sucked in all light and life from the world around it. It was like trying to hold an abyss of nothingness in your hands.

And it was coming right towards her.

Fear chilled her veins, and she turned and ran. Her booted feet battered the metal of the substation halls, and behind she felt the empty presence closing in. Gritting her teeth, she twisted her amplifier and dropped an array of gravity warping landmines behind her, invisible bends in the world that should slow down anything chasing her.

The emptiness kept coming. It passed through her traps; Holly heard the buckle of metal and scream of breaking circuitry.

It didn't slow down.

She sprinted as fast as her legs would carry her, gently manipulating the resistance of the air around her to gain just a sliver of extra speed. The guards seemed to have disappeared along with everyone else, and she burst out into the city again, the great rise of the transformer plant rising in front of her. The street was as suddenly devoid of life as the rest of the substation.

A temporary refuge, she thought. That was the only reason she'd been allowed to even get this far. That bastard just wanted to get a look before he and his cronies scurried off to carry out... whatever their plan was.

Metal warped and screamed behind her, tearing Holly from her thoughts. She twisted around, backing away with her amplifier raised. Out in the open now, she wanted to see what had been sent after her. The door to the substation gaped open, but the corridor beyond remained dark, the interior lights providing little for her eyes to latch onto.

She waited, senses questing in the gloom. The strange, slippery nothingness in the datastream sputtered, like a flickering television set. Fear got the better of her, and with a snarl of effort, Holly wrapped her tendrils around the structure of the entranceway, and collapsed it.