Crack in the Kill Code (AmpCore #2)

53 - Two-Way Echoes

Against all her instincts, Holly went to work.

Fuck her head still hurt, and she still didn't fully understand what the corporate kill team had used on her. It seemed, with all the instability at AmpCore, some enterprising bastard in the security divisions had come up with something to level the playing field for the unaugmented. Her implants felt tight – stretched across her bones like elastic bands.

The gun in Nevay's hand helped focus her mind. Holly inhaled; exhaled. Her amplifier slowly slid from its sheathe and gripped it gently, letting the connections come together. As the tendrils of her awareness seeped out into the room, she could feel everything – the deep thunder of fear in Treysi's heartbeats, Nevay's itching trigger finger; the nerves jangling up and down Kirk's body.

She shut most of it out, and sat down in front of Treysi, trying to ignore the shadow of the gun in the corner of her eye.

"Just try to relax," she told the girl. "I'll do the hard work."

"Again," Treysi replied with a fleeting, terrified smile.

"If there is some kind of ... signal coming off you, I'll find it."

"And if you can't find it?"

"Then we'll know it was all just a coincidence," Kirk interjected. He stood with his arms folded, his expression dark with barely contained bitterness as he glanced at Nevay. "And we can stop this shit."

"Let's wait and see if you're right before you start hating me, Kirk," Nevay spat back, before nodding to Holly. "Get on with it."

She reached out, and touched her amplifier gently against Treysi's knee. It could all be done from a distance if needed, but anything that could take some of the weight off of Holly's aching implants was welcome. Her invisible tendrils latched onto Treysi's bloodstream and set off, mapping the insides of their mysterious companion.

Some of it was familiar; roads well travelled when she'd reconstructed the girl's body and stopped her half-finished grafts from ripping her to pieces from the inside out. But she hadn't been looking for anything then – just patching and fixing in a wild race against time. That had led her to inadvertently discover the aggression codes patched into the system, but they hadn't been well hidden.

The transmission – if it was there – must have been buried deep for her to miss it on her first trip. As she worked her way through the organic organs, she thought back to Pardua – poor fucking Layne Pardua – and how he'd managed to track the location of the leader of these freaks from across the water. Their foe had been broadcasting, certainly, able to stop the signature of the unique chip signatures that powered his army of killers.

A mute signal – that was what Pardy had called it. Maybe there was something like that hiding inside Treysi Cabrera. Some dark void of anti-signal designed to keep out all but the most determined interlopers.

Their enemy might have known about AmpCore operatives, but he clearly didn't know the full extent of what they could do. Didn't know just how deep someone like Holly could dig if she wanted to. People like Arrow flaunted their prowess with Logistics, but as far as Holly was concerned, it was glorified computer hacking.

She was here hacking a human being.

The arm section didn't yield any results, just a lot of metal with no cold spots. She spent a few extra seconds checking and re-checking the elbow hinges and servos, and the graft point where metal met flesh, but found nothing.

Holly let a twang of irritation ring through her as she moved on. She went up through the arm, and into the brain implants again. There was actually no reason a transmitter would have to be in the brain, but some vague sense of human anatomical bias drove her there next. The lattice lines of the connections to her eye implants shimmered beautifully in Holly's mind's eye. She spared a moment for those, seeing the intricacies and micro-generators that allowed Treysi to fry the corporate guard's helmet from several meters away.