Glitch in the God Complex (AmpCore #1)

22 - My Badge is Bigger Than Yours

"Yeah," he chuckled, beckoning her. "Follow me."

Crossing the bustle of the market, he kept one hand on the flick-blade in his jacket pocket, keeping his shoulders square and not straying too far from Delgado. The market wasn't somewhere you expected a fight – unspoken neutral ground – but there were a lot of stupid people in Hadrian who didn't like rules.

He spotted a couple of grizzled looking men loitering at the far corner of the square worthy of a wary eye, but they didn't seem interested in him, or Delgado's burden, busying themselves with shaking down a food vendor's stall.

Probably a couple of thugs running for Cutter Jennings. Kirk decided it would be good to keep out of their way.

"In here," he said, increasing his pace. The wheels of the loader clunked on the uneven paving behind him as he led her to the square mouth of a door stuffed into a junction where two buildings met. The sign above it read in faded neon, 'Braytech Solutions'.

An opaque curtain covered the entrance and he swept it aside, stepping through the threshold, and through the red lattice of a security grid. Something bleeped from deeper in.

"Hold there!" a voice called.

Kirk halted, awkwardly sidling up to the wall so Delgado could fit herself and the loader in alongside him. They waited a moment and she gave him a questioning look.

"Just give it a second," he said.

Then the proprietor of the establishment slunk into view at the end of the short passage, a small, gleaming pistol handing in one bony hand. He was a gangly man in his fifties, with black-grey hair greased back over his skull and a set of faded corporate overalls clinging to his skeletal frame.

A cigarette smouldered between cracked lips, and the man's bloodshot eyes lit up with recognition as he took a draw.

"Balfour, y'alright, mate?" he crowed in his Oceanic twang, the pistol disappearing into one pocket of his overalls. "Been too long."

"Keeping well enough, Selbray," Kirk replied, shooting the man a crooked smile. "You?"

"Survivin' little man, survivin'. Got a little promotion this month, y'know. I'm now an official technical inspector." Selbray's scrawny chest puffed with pride before his gaze shifted to Delgado. "Who's your friend?"

"This is Chloe. She's got a job for you."

"What kinda job?"

"The kind that pays well." Kirk glanced back at the curtain, before indicating the passage ahead with a nod. "And the kind that we probably shouldn't talk about out here."

"Oh-oh." Selbray grinned. "What'd you step in this time?"

"Nothing. Just isn't something I want everyone on the docks eye-balling."

The man beckoned, taking a drag on his cigarette as he turned. "Alright, come on through."

They followed. He helped Delgado guide the bulky loader through the narrow hall and manoeuvre it through the doorway at the far end, whereupon the spilled out into Selbray's workshop. The place looked like a warzone, with pieces of machinery littering the place like limbs waiting for amputation. Screens in varying states of disrepair flickered and sparked amidst the cloud of cigarette smoke. He could smell the cheap, acrid sting of Selbray's home made still bubbling in the back corner of the room.

"Right then." Selbray slumped down in a chair behind a detritus-strewn desk. He passed one hand over a control built into it, and the door behind them hissed shut. "All nice and cosy. What've you got for me?"