23. Golden cage
As their gaze met, Dan jumped into action, making up his mind over the days if this moment comes ever. Brad dropped a lifeless body of his shoulder, another engineer barely caught the guy from falling to the floor, and he ran. Didn’t matter which direction, just to get out of sight of his previous victim turned hunter.
The corridors were different this time. As they ran unimpeded by debris, slight curvature hiding the distant ceiling from them, closed and broken bulkheads zooming by. The oldest tricks in the books used by Brad, pushing loose metal plates and beams from the sides to the center to slow his pursuer down worked. Out of sight he opened a bulkhead with the console, disappearing from the corridor.
Dan slowed down by vaulting over the debris, started to fall back dozens of meters. He could not keep up the speed anyway, his abdomen in pain, risking his internal bleeding to start again. Yet the closest trace he had, possible answers to his questions, is just ahead of him running. Not running anymore, the heavy metallic steps stopped, Brad must have slowed down too. Or even better, he used a door.
Saw a data port a meter from him, calmly as he has all the time of the world, Dan walked there, connected and checked for a single information in the logs. Many people were totally unaware how much data is collected on a ship like this. Every action anyone does is logged in vast databases, correlated with previous data and used for predictive maintenance in best cases, or correlated with implants and their signatures to personalize advertisements everywhere you go. Only the really wealthy could afford signature dampeners or buy advertisement free services, everyone else had to suffer the never ending ads on their free time. Of course on their free time as companies hated distractions of their workers, either paying their unfair share to advertisement platforms or build custom software on their own dime.
Dan got the answer less than a millisecond, the exact position of the last opened bulkhead, nearest to him, just ahead on the same corridor. From an old job, he still had a private key of those advertisement platforms, so he extracted a personal implant identifier, just in case. Wasn’t sure if it is Brad’s, the ID wasn’t personalized. At the same time he uploaded a few commands to the bulkheads to trigger on the same ID.
The bulkhead led to a hydroponics farm. Most ships used only dry food, long term rations, here on the Giant of the Stars that was not feasible for the wealthy passengers. They wanted fresh salad with their meals, the latest craze for micro-greens, photos shared on the net, so called friends would envy their manufactured selfies and food pictures with a planet or star-cradle in the background. Some things just never change about humanity.
The farm was heavily damaged in the sudden slow down, racks teared up from the floors, pipes and cables tangled up, water lining the floor giving it a green hue and salads and tomatoes thrown everywhere. Unlucky for Brad, the footprint clearly visible in the half-crunched tomatoes, Dan could easily follow those. Step by step avoiding to leave his own marks, with Ava in his back, he closed in on Brad. The footprints got compressed into a small patch as their owner didn’t know where to go from here.
Dan knew the ship well, another bulkhead led out of the farm on the far side, but the metal and plastic spaghetti that once were trays, pipes and lights giving life to plants got really dense at the back of the hall, like a dish thrown to the wall by a giant. So the only exits was the one they came in. Quick splashes behind them got their attention.
Brad was sprinting toward the open bulkhead, but as he got to arms length, the heavy door dropped to its place and locked, stopping Brad in his tracks.
- “Grab a plastic and pull up!” — Dan shouted to Ava, while Brad stood confused in the middle.
Brad pulled out a metal crowbar, and circled toward Dan for another fight. But Dan wasn’t in the mood, as Ava crawled onto the plant pipes, he jumped onto another and yanked a still vibrating grow light onto the floor. Brad’s body contracting and releasing rhythmically, unable to control himself while electrocuted in the water. Took a few seconds until the power source burnt itself out and Brad fell unconsciously into the now safe water.
Dan was already at him, connecting his data port while Ava climbed down.
- “Oh, he is trained against connections.” — Dan grinned as he combated Brad’s implants and mind. Even unconsciously, his mind kept going to early memories, Brad’s junior posting on a smaller cruise line, stills of his family, cute daughter.
Defense by overwhelming the connection, simple yet effective method to protect important data. But what is he hiding? Dan fought with the stream of memories and kept digging, navigating the branches expertly. This guy had much better hardware than expected from a low level engineer, Brad sported some serious memory modules and capturing devices, he could not have paid for with his job.
Finally Dan accessed clips from a dark corner of Brad’s mind, a short excerpt without sound showing an anonymized character, a dark shadow changing its shape continuously. Dan saw this before when he read to the fish tattoo guy’s memories who tried to kill him. So there is a connection, they both met with someone before. Could be different people, yet not many had anonymizer tech. Actually Dan had no idea who could have such tech, it wasn’t available even on black markets.
- “Aahhh…” — Dan cried out, followed by Brad when the feedback propagated through their active connection.
Brad was resuscitated by an implant and gave a right hook to the focusing Dan, essentially feeling the same pain he caused. Dan repaid him immediately without disconnecting, knocking himself in the head virtually. Both exhausted, Dan just disconnected and pulled away.
- “So you were led on to kill me…” — Dan started to put the picture together — “Saw your family, you got trapped by higher ups, demanding more work for less pay then what happened? They asked for illegal stuff?”
- “Damn you!”
- “Saw the unmarked crates you moved, the logs you altered. What they had over you?”
- “I just wanted a better life for my daughter, to stay on a planet instead of this…” — finally Brad broke down.
- “So they promised that… You know that won’t happen? That these people never gonna fulfill their side of the bargain, just use you and throw you away.”
- “That… is… not true, my family, we will get to a ranch and be free…”
- “You could be happy if we get out of this ship alive. Those who led you, aren’t here to help. Tell me, who tasked you to kill me and why?”
- “Go to hell!” — Brad took another swing at Dan but missed the mark — “You, you had to play the data broker for these b-holes. And now for a good pay day, you gonna be dead, cause you wanted to play with fire.”
- “So the encrypted data in my head is what they are after? Kinda obvious. Never intended to pay for it?”
- “You should not have it, a rat gave it to you.” — Dan avoided a few more punches.
- “You never killed anyone before, I see. You could just leave the ship, tough to build a new life elsewhere, but there is no reason you could not leave at any port.”
- “If not me, someone else will get to you to zero it. You built your own cage by working for them.”
- “As I see, we both built our own golden cages.” — Dan had enough and knocked Brad out with a straight up blow.
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