Crack in the Kill Code (AmpCore #2)

43 - Every Second Wasted

She felt sweeps of bitter anger as she stepped off the U-Rail.

Piper felt her skin crawl as the corporate heart of Hadrian swallowed her up. The evergrind – the fucking spiv-home in all its neon glory. It was all she could do not to let the frustration bleed out further into her surroundings, jamming her hands into the pockets of her purloined jacket and forcing herself to walk towards the clustering, light-vomiting spires.

After spending some time back out in the docks alone, the sheer hum of the datastreams here made her head hurt. She blocked out the worst of it, folding her implants in on herself and trudging through the flow of opulent citizens passing her on either side.

A drone whinnied overhead, and she almost lurched into the shadow of a nearby building, before realising it was just an ad-hauler, a shimmering screen slung under its hexagonal carapace. Glowering at the machine as it buzzed on its way, Piper continued, each step taking her deeper and deeper into the jaws of Hadrian's corporations.

She sheered away from the monoliths in the centre, touching a finger to the surging datastreams and skimming for anything concerning her, her family, or anyone else she knew. At first it looked like business as usual. She teased out a few references to unexplained server shutdowns and blackouts in isolated parts of the central district – a warehouse here, a stock-data centre here, ranging across several of the major corporations.

Signs of Toran and Vinder's civil war, she suspected. Official news covered it as a series of unconnected incidents. Maybe that's what all those earnest-faced reporters actually thought, but she doubted it. So it was all well under way, so far under the radar, but sooner or later it would all spill out, and this happy, vapid facade would get washed away.

Fuck, how she would have loved to see that.

Letting herself revel in the fantasy for a little bit, Piper walked quickly through the broad, brightly-lit streets until she cleared some of the fancier buildings, and entered a section of the heart that looked altogether more utilitarian. Fewer logos, darker buildings, punctuated with bright, crisply decorated bars and restaurants filled with sharp-dressed men and woman. They looked a little less at ease than most of those you saw in the heart.

Then the logo came into sight: a with a simple, glowing white ring with a single dot in the centre. It loomed over a set of fixed above mirror-polished glass doors set into the front of a large, grey cube of a building. Several stories climbed, modest by the standards of Hadrian's skyscrapers, but still fairly imposing, glittering with windows like the portholes of the world's least practical ship.

She eased her amplifier loose, reaching into the datastreams to double check – again – that this really was where she was supposed to be. Sure enough, the coordinates matched those that Vinder had given her. She really was standing in front of Hadrian's corporate Oversight Bureau.

Piper knew of the Bureau largely by rumour. A rubber stamp body that, if you wanted to believe it, provided a guiding hand and put reigns on the excesses of the corporations. She strongly suspected that, like most things in the city, it was a token gesture to shut up anyone who questioned the order of things.

It occurred to her that the alternative was almost worse. If this was how the corporations operated with oversight, what in the hell would happen without it?

Hadrian South provided a glimpse of that, she supposed. In the aftermath of the AI incident, it seemed that Oversight had swept into action with an uncharacteristic alacrity, but when Conan Knox was the one holding the cattle prod, that wasn't exactly surprising.

The main question was why on Earth Vinder had chosen this place for a meeting. Neutral ground maybe? Distrust crawled over Piper's skin like spiders and she resisted the urge to slip into the shadows.