Mattise entered his office, his visor shimmering with fresh reports.

He did not like what he was reading. Things were spiralling out of control. No matter how many arguments he'd advanced for the continued confinement of Toran Knox and Vinder Tovas, the sheer weight of Hadrian's corporations had been too much to stave off. Too much funding would have disappeared, too many trade offs, too many conditions of restoring the board and tying his hands.

So he'd cut deals. He'd kept control. And then both parties had left the academy to do god-knows-what. Now Grennick Lanson had disappeared, which meant the full weight of Real-Raid was now sitting on his neck, not to mention the push and pull from Skiltron and Wayfinder, the main leaders of the two factions trying to exert control.

He felt like a father trying to keep fighting children apart at arm's length.

Sitting down, he poured a glass of crystal water from the decanter on the desk and sighed, taking a sip and swivelling idly back and forth in thought. The old board of AmpCore – many of them architects of that deranged venture that tried to create a new AI core – had turned their full ire upon him for having one iota of control taken away. Although there had been a handful of arrests, and a few carefully worded media statements about 'restricted technology' to cover up the bloodbath, he knew that the main players were still at large. Still sitting at the top of the pyramid.

Only his experience and bloody-mindedness had kept them at bay so far. He wondered how much longer that would hold out.

Taking another sip of water, he swept a hand over his computer control, bringing the film of glass to life. Academy statistics flooded down the screen, showing the rankings of the current crop of students. Twisting his hand in the air, he tugged Piper's record out of the morass.

She'd been making good progress until all this. At least, in some areas. She still lacked the finesse for proper internal principle work, and her atmospheric control remained dangerously volatile, as likely to cause an earthquake as bring some rainfall. But she was tough, resilient, and could level a skyscraper if you let her.

Frustration yanked at him. So much power in that body of hers, with those strange living implants that every corporation in the city wanted to get their wires plugged into. So many mysteries that they would tear out of her by force. Whether Piper survived the process or not didn't matter.

Despite his disgust at some of his fellow agents' butcher approach, their motivations weren't so different from his own. Where had her implants come from? And what was she truly capable of?

His thoughts wandered into the past, back to Niall Casimir. An AmpCore operative, Piper's real father had been involved in things even Mattise wasn't privy to, all those years ago when he'd still been mastering his implants. Blacktech, salvage work in Hadrian South, secret excursions into the deep and the dark. And then he disappeared. Vanished off the face of the Earth.

Dead. Probably dead.

Wherever he'd gone, his secrets had gone with him. While bad blood between the corporations was something he knew he could never truly solve, perhaps solving the mystery of Piper might help take some of the heat out of the conflict.

Mattise tapped a finger thoughtfully against his desk, then brought his visor back up, firing a call out into the academy datastream. The trace whipped efficiently through the torrents of information, staying below the nets of the official call logs. He smiled thinly. Easier to skirt security when you were running the place.

The connection linked. A face appeared; another AmpCore agent with a green and white Ventris Refineries logo printed on his jacket shoulder.

"Bannerman, it's Mattise."

"Sir," the young man replied, smiling. "What can I do for you?"

Mattise snorted lightly. The other agent's demeanour was a lot more chipper than most of the people Mattise was used to working with, but he seemed competent, and more importantly, didn't have ties to any of the warmongering factions.

"I need a net trawl."

"How deep?"

"Say six months."

Bannerman's enthusiasm waned a little. "Six months?"

"Yes."

"And what am I looking for?"

"I need to know if there's been any chatter over our heads, specifically relating to pre-Schism tech."

"So blacktech?" Bannerman replied wryly.

"Possibly."

"Who are we looking at?"

"Stick to the big players. Skiltron, Wayfinder, Gammaton, Ardenne, Prometheus. If you run across anything else, feel free to chase the rabbit."

"So, this is about the girl, Piper, right?" Bannerman asked.

Mattise shrugged. "I guarantee that they're all trying to figure out just what makes her tick. If we can get there first, we'll have a big bargaining chip."

"Sir, I've got to say, I don't think that's going to stop Skiltron and Wayfinder from ripping each other to bits."

"Maybe not," he conceded, "but we have to start somewhere."

"Alright." Bannerman nodded, raking the nails of both hands through his short fuzz of black hair. "I'll need a little time to prep for a trawl like that if I want to-,"

Suddenly, the line went dead. Bannerman's face disappeared and Mattise blinked in surprise.

"Bannerman?"

The comm-link remained silent, not even cracking with the static of a broken connection. The visor fell from Mattise's eyes and he broadened his senses, pressing at the confines of the office with invisible fingers.

He found an emptiness. A chill crawled over his skin.

Then the door to his office slid open.

His eyes narrowed, flashing up to see a sinewy man in AmpCore uniform step through. No knock, no announcement from the door's locking system. He just walked right in.

Mattise recognised the newcomer – Jonas Evra – a senior practitioner from Wayfinder's contingent. He had tanned skin and a tangle of curly dark hair, his face set in a near-permanent expression of disinterest. He was also not alone.

Five more AmpCore agents followed him in. A glance at their uniforms and insignias was enough for Mattise to see that they were all fully qualified field agents. None of them seemed to be friendly faces. His jaw tightened and he reached out with his implants for the office's silent alarm system.

He found nothing.

"Administrator Mattise," Evra said coming to a halt in front of the desk. He clasped his hands together in front of him and gave a small, respectful nod.

"Jonas," Mattise replied, letting his eyes move around the room. A mix of Gammaton, Wayfinder, and one dark-skinned woman from Real-Raid who looked like she wanted to gut him. "I didn't have an appointment scheduled."

"No, you did not."

"Ah." He leaned back and took a sip of water, before placing the glass back down on the table, his mind racing.

"I'm afraid the alarms are disabled," Evra continued. "I am sorry, but that the board has voted, Administrator. We are here to remove you from your position."

"I'd figured that much out," Mattise hissed, "but there is no board. You have no authority."

"You dissolved the board without authority. This is a corporate facility with multiple invested parties. What you have done amounts to an attempted Ness-Net takeover. You understand that, I trust?"

"I know how the fucking place works. I haven't handed anything over to Ness-Net, or anyone else. When all of you stupid bastards can prove you can stop fighting over this facility, maybe – just maybe – I'll reinstate the board."

"We are not here to negotiate with you." Evra gently withdrew his amplifier from its sheathe. His expression softened a little. "Administrator, there is no need for this to escalate. Relinquish control of the academy systems, put yourself in my custody and I will ensure this goes no further."

"Is that your best offer?"

"It is the only offer."

"I have a counter-proposal," he snarled. "Take your lackeys and get out of my office, and tell the board that they have shown they are not fit to run AmpCore." With a disdainful sniff, he gestured to the other agents standing in the room. "I think this proves my point, don't you?"

Evra's face darkened. "You forget your place, Anton."

Silence simmered. Seconds ticked by, and he could feel the uneasy twitching and twisting of the implants in the room.

Without breaking eye contact with the other man, Mattise stood up, unfolding slowly and deliberately to his full height. He was outnumbered six to one in a confined space – nasty odds for even the finest practitioner of the art – but the logic just wouldn't take root in his brain, shunted aside by something else.

In theory he could surrender. They'd cart him off somewhere, and the world would never know he existed at all by the time they were finished. He might live, but he'd be dead in all the ways that mattered.

And what would be the point? His life was AmpCore. He'd given decades of it to try and keep this institution in one piece. He'd believed in it. And now, after all that, this was thanks he was going to get. Disappeared into the evergrind, not even a footnote in history.

"Do I indeed?"

As he said those three words, Anton Mattise knew he was a dead man. He made his peace with it in that instant, his eyes narrowing into a glare as he looked at the other agents. Frustration turned to anger; anger turned to white-hot fury. He had the sudden feeling of being the only sane person left in the world.

"Mattise, I advise you-,"

He didn't hear the rest. Mattise dropped flat behind his desk and ripped his amplifier loose. Then he rolled as a combustive bolt blasted a furrow where he'd been lying an instant before. His roll brought him out into the open and he lashed out. Gravity crunched the closest operative to him, smashing them into the wall with a crack of breaking bones.

Mattise twisted up to one knee and deflected another bolt off into the ceiling, blasting a hole in the confined space of his office. He spun, feeling the heat from another blast, even as he reached out into the room, his amplifier hunting for bones and tendons in the smoke. He found an ankle; shattered it. A woman screamed.

A gravitic blast sent him flying. He hit the wall, his own barrier stopping him from being broken apart by the force. It still rung him like a bell. Mattise let out a snarl of pain, his amplifier flaring with power as he ripped a whole chunk of wall plating loose and hurled it at his foes.

One woman deflected it in a panic, sending it straight into the man standing to her left. The plate of metal cut him in two, spraying gore across the office.

Mattise started moving in the instant of surprise that afforded him, when a boiling blast of hell from one of the injured operatives caught him in the side. His barrier stopped some of it, but his right flank was burned raw, the skin blistering and popping from the searing heat.

He screamed and fell, lashing out wildly in all directions with his amplifier. The ceiling cracked; chunks of circuitry and ceiling panels fell all around them. Tendrils of invisible force could around his right leg and he felt them tighten like a python, the bone cracking under the strain.

With a screech of fury, Mattise blasted combustive stream at the offending operative, and melted a hole through the man's chest. The tendrils disappeared; his attacker pitched forward face first, dead.

Dragging himself backwards through the smoke, he lashed a wave of gravity through the room, trying to keep his attackers occupied. Another of Evra's cohorts went flying, crashing through the spindly computer screen with a howl of pain. Then the floor beneath him bucked like a wild horse.

Mattise was airborne for a few seconds, the pain in his leg and side making it impossible to concentrate long enough to stop his descent. He slammed into the ground, and bit his tongue; tasted the tang of blood. He rolled, his amplifier gripped like a vice. With a howl of effort, he levered himself into a sitting position and gathered enough energy to lash out at the closest shape.

The woman from Wayfinder managed to block the searing blast of energy, but the backwash knocked her flat, leaving her a groaning, smoking heap on the floor.

Before Mattise could find another target, his wrist snapped.

He howled in pain, his amplifier clattering to the floor between his legs. A whip of force sent it hurtling away from him, shattering to pieces against the opposite wall. Jonas Evra staggered out of the smoke, his uniform torn and one leg gashed deeply. He glared down at Mattise, shaking his head with a mix of anger and pity.

"It didn't have to be like this," Evra panted, levelling his amplifier. "Anton Mattise, by the authority of the AmpCore Academy board of directors, pursuant to special security clause 0696, I hereby relive you of-,"

"Oh, shut your fucking mouth and finish it!"

Mattise had just enough time to spit a mouthful of blood at the other man, before a combustive blast punched through his heart.

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