Chapter Ten
The extraction
Chantel woke the next morning in a stupor, still groggy and hung over from the previous night’s activities. The entire night had passed in a blur. At Aunty Bessie’s insistence the party had moved to the eating quarters where, in the warm glow of the kitchen, the guests were welcomed into the fold of the pirate ship with open arms. The table was a revolving lazy susan of various crew people and their families who all dropped by in curiosity to gawk at the latest visitors. They were particularly interested in Chantel and Beren. It was uncommon for anyone on the boat to have had met a person from the metropolis of the south eastern quadrant. Chantel and Beren were bombarded with questions about what it was like to live in Sydney metropolis. What did the city look like? What were the people like? What did they wear? What did they do for entertainment? The line of questioning soon turned to Beren’s paraplegia. How did he manage? Didn’t he miss walking? Did he have to travel everywhere with the chair? How did he cope by himself?
Beren abruptly became annoyed with these questions and feigned tiredness. Aunty Bessie came to his rescue and showed Beren to a ready-made cabin just off the kitchen area, which Beren could access easily in his wheelchair. It wasn’t too long afterwards that Chantel also made her excuses and crashed on the bunk above Beren’s in the four person cabin. The other bunk bed was occupied with two adolescent aged siblings, who were well and truly asleep by the time Chantel retired. Her last memory was of falling asleep listening to Beren’s wheezy breathing from below and staring enraptured at the faces of the siblings sleeping adjacent to her. Like the people of Cape Town, the features of the siblings were subtly different from the demographic in Sydney. The differences that Chantel had noticed among the people in Cape Town of having slightly darker skin and curlier hair than people in Sydney, were even more pronounced in the features of these teenagers and indeed the other inhabitants of the Kazaa. Chantel remembered the purpose of her adventure and her heartbeat quickened. They were getting closer to finding the purebloods. Chantel just knew it.
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When Chantel climbed down from her bunk bed, she expected to see the same two adolescents across from her that she had fallen asleep staring at the night before. She was surprised to see that the bunk bed now had different occupants. A man and a woman were sound asleep in the bunks, despite it seeming to Chantel that the hour of the morning was already outrageously late. She could smell the scent of coffee drifting into the cabin from the kitchen area. The moment she descended Beren had just sat up in his bed and was in the process of transferring to his wheelchair. Just as soon as Chantel rushed to offer assistance Beren quickly and swiftly effected the transition.
“Thanks for the offer Chanty but you have to be quicker than that to be of any use to me,” Beren said cheerfully, already displaying a merrier mood than he had for the entire journey on the Saharan.
Chantel and Beren crossed into the kitchen where a familial gathering was already bustling. Julie and Condor were nowhere to be found, as was the case the previous night, but Chantel and Beren recognised some of the faces of the people that had been so insistent in their questioning the night before. With the guidance of others, Chantel and Beren each poured themselves a cup of coffee and found themselves a breakfast pack to reheat. Just when they had settled at the table to start digging into their meals, Condor made another bold entrance.
“So I trust you both had a comfortable night’s sleep. We try to make our guests on the Kazaa as welcome as possible. I mean, this place is no hotel but we can still try to turn on the charm. We like to think of it as being like a B&B on water. That’s an accurate description of our quaint, little pirate ship wouldn’t you say?”
“Well thank god you rescued me when you did from that awful Saharan. I was like a prisoner on that thing,” Beren piped up.
“Haha, prisoner you say! Make sure you tell Julie that. She’s the one that has an issue with being a prison guard,” Condor sneered.
Chantel was instantly repulsed. Beren knew only too well that Julie was no oppressor and his depiction of being a prisoner on the boat was nothing more than an exaggeration.
“So what is the story between you and Julie,” Chantel inquired. “I get the feeling that there is some intense history between you two.”
Condor grimaced and shook his head.
“Boy, oh, boy. You folks know nothing,” Condor said, pulling up a chair at the table. “Julie is my wife. She’s the other Captain of this ship, which we built together. Ten wonderful years we had, sailing the seas together. It was marvellous being a pirate on these waters in those days. The pickings were rich and plentiful. Ay, did we have some good times. Well, I tell you this…it ain’t easy running a pirate ship in this day and age. The supplies, the port restrictions, fewer pirates to man the decks. With less chartered vessels roaming the seas and more goods being transported on those massive cruise ships, it’s getting harder and harder to find what we need to make this baby run. We had to find different ways of gaining the comparative advantage, so to speak. Julie and I disagreed on what the best way of doing this would be, but the way I saw it…I didn’t really have a choice. I didn’t really know how much Julie disagreed with what I was doing on the Kazaa, but one day, five years ago, I woke up and she was gone leaving just an angry message that she would not be a part of such injustice.”
Chantel was floored. Julie simply didn’t seem to have the temperament of a pirate. She could not imagine Julie as being in the same league as Condor, who friendly as he was for the moment, did appear to have something sinister about him. Beren was slightly less taken by surprise.
“So what was it that Julie disagreed with as being so evil?” he blatantly asked. “Should we start running away from you now? Because if so, it is going to be easy for you since I can’t swim.”
Condor burst into laughter for the first time, and in doing so, skilfully skirted around the topic.
“I’ll let Julie explain that one to you, as I’m sure she will in due course. In the meantime finish your meals. I’ll be back in a little while to perform the extraction. We are pirates after all.”
Chantel froze. Extraction? What did Condor mean by that? Before Chantel could query further, Condor had gone.
“What do you think he means by the extraction?” Chantel whispered to Beren. “There’s something bizarre about this whole thing.”
“Sure is,” Beren replied. “Why would you give up living on a ship like this to steer a boat like the Saharan? That doesn’t make sense. At least this ship has ramps!”
“Beren, I’m talking about Condor. He seems shifty to me. How do we know we can trust him? I think we should try to find Julie and speak to her about this.”
“I think I’d rather trust Condor than Julie to be honest. How do you know Julie didn’t lead us into this trap in the first place? It seemed all too convenient that we ended up like sitting ducks in the path of a pirate ship.”
“Beren! You know that was your own fault. What with stealing the boat like that and sailing it into a trap. I don’t think Julie planned to get us into this. Did you see her face when she saw the ship? She was traumatised.”
“Hehe, yeah. Imagine coming face to face with a long lost husband. Julie sure has some skeletons in her closet, that’s for sure. I can see that they are a good match for each other though. I mean, not as good as you and I obviously--”
Chantel ignored Beren’s jibes.
“You might think this is one big joke Beren, but I’m scared. I don’t have a good feeling about all of this.”
At that moment Condor reappeared in the kitchen.
“Don’t worry folks there’s nothing to be scared about,” Condor said, unashamedly revealing that he had been listening to the conversation. “It’s just a simple extraction. It won’t hurt at all. Now if you’ve finished your meals I’ll take you down to the extraction room and you can have a bit more of a look around this ship. What do you say?”
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br /> Not knowing what else to do, Chantel and Beren did as Condor suggested and followed him down a winding corridor into what they imagined was the centre of the ship. Deep in the bowels of the vessel, they were led into a cavern, in which the diffused light from the outside sun illuminated various cords and buttons on a jumble of computer servers. The heat emanating from the servers in this room was intense, as was the distinct robotic hum reverberating from the computer equipment.
“We try to save energy in this room by keeping the lights off when no one is in here,” Condor explained, switching on the lights.
Suddenly the entire cabin was illuminated with bright, white, LED light. The room was crammed with computer equipment; servers and hard drives of all different sizes filled every nook and cranny of the cavern as well as wires, microchips and various other circuit boards strewn across the floor. One wall of the room was covered with projection screens upon which images of the ocean surrounding the Kazaa from different vantage points flickered intermittently over the screens. A huge sonar screen in the corner vigorously scanned the area, emitting a high-pitched beep upon detecting other vessels in the tracking zone. Chantel and Beren realised that the Saharan would easily have been detected by the Kazaa using this equipment.
“Welcome to the Computer Control Centre, otherwise known as the triple C if you’re into acronyms, and let’s face it, who isn’t?” Condor joked to himself. “This is where we do all our tracking among other things. You can see we have a state of the art sonar syst over there, the security cams down that side, we even have a high tech alert system that’s honed into the wireless frequency used by the global police so we can listen in on all their communicator calls. We gotta be on our toes here on the Kazaa.”
Chantel looked over to Beren. His face was bright beyond delight. She could tell he was in heaven being in a hacker’s paradise such as this. Even with her advanced capabilities as a tech eng at Pangaea, the technological capacity she was witnessing surpassed anything she had previously dealt with in her day job. Within the depths of the CCC in the Kazaa, Chantel was surrounded by highlights of innovation that were at least five years beyond anything Pangaea had been working on. While Pangaea and the other global five companies had been concentrating their efforts on developing greater satellite capabilities for communications and monitoring movement, it would appear that the team on board the Kazaa had been working on the opposite. Sonar was the frequency of choice for the communication systems used on the Kazaa. Using encrypted frequencies sent via sonar wavelengths, the Kazaa could send messages to other vessels in its pirate network and by using this previously untapped technology, could also prevent detection by the global police. It appeared that Beren and Condor certainly did have something in common.
“This is absolute genius,” Beren exclaimed. “Defying the global police by using sonar waves. You mean that even the global police haven’t developed the technology yet to communicate under the waves?”
“Apparently not,” Condor smugly replied. “So this is the way we pass all our information.”
“What sort of intel is being sent?” Chantel asked. “And who are you sending it to?”
“Anything and everything that can be stored as data can be sent under the sea,” Condor continued. “We have clients that are interested in whatever we can give them. As long as they give us a good price, then it’s no skin off my nose to send them what they want. For instance, I bet we will have a fair few people that are keen for what is on the chip in that pretty little head of yours. Are you ready for your extraction?”
Chantel was suddenly on guard once again.
“What do you mean? You want to take from me what is on my hard drive? You know that is illegal.”
“Relax,” Condor reassured. “We are out on open water. If the global police caught you now, you would probably already be thrown into jail just for fraternising with pirates. This is what we do whether you like it or not.”
At that point, Condor’s voice took on a menacing tone and his eyes narrowed. Chantel knew that his last words were meant as a threat and there was nowhere for her to escape. She looked to Beren for reassurance. He shrugged his shoulders unapologetically. With no choice but to acquiesce Chantel took a seat on an impressive looking throne of a chair. She imagined hand cuffs springing out from the arm rests and metal latches encircling her waist to hold her captive in the chair. Her heart pounded as she squeezed her eyes shut tightly, wondering what this extraction involved and if it would hurt.
“Just hold still while I put this stylus in position,” she heard Condor say.
She felt something metallic resting against her head and the hum of a hard drive close to her ear. She opened her eyes and at that moment Condor announced that the extraction was complete.
“There you go. That wasn’t so bad was it?” Condor smirked. “It’s just like going to the dentist.”
Chantel turned to face Condor, but he was already engrossed in reviewing the entire contents of Chantel’s hard drive.
“A Pangaea chip. We don’t come across too many of ‘em in these parts I gotta say. It’s usually all Utopia chips around here. There should be some good buyers for this stuff.”
Chantel watched aghast as the entire contents of her hard drive were displayed on the projector screens in the cavern. The catalogue not only had material she had downloaded, but her own personal creations and data were also on display. It was all there to be traded on the black market.
“Fascinating,” Beren piped up. “What algorithm did you use to decrypt the digital rights management on the files?”
“Now, now, Beren,” Condor said, oscillating back to his slightly more scary demeanour. “You, just like any other self-respecting hacker should know that I can’t disclose that sort of information. If I do, I just might have to kill you. You wouldn’t want that would you, so it’s best to nip your curiosity in the bud now.”
Condor once again exuded a more threatening disposition for a fleeting moment and then returned instantaneously to his usual charisma.
“What about my personal stuff?” Chantel asked. “I can understand you selling the download files but no one will be interested in my own data will they?”
Condor turned to face her.
“Oh, I see. Protective are we? Scared that our privacy will be breached? Well, to be honest you never know what people will buy nowadays and there may be people who are interested in your personal life. Then again, I do sort of feel a little bit grateful to you both for bringing Julie back to me. And I know that she thinks the world of you. What do you say I cut you a deal? I’ll delete the files that you want deleted, if Beren lets me in on his secrets about how he performed his hacking heist.”
Chantel was confused. Condor had threatened to kill Beren for inquiring about exactly the same information of Condor’s just moments before.
“That’s entirely up to him,” she said. “It doesn’t make sense for you to bargain off his knowledge for my information. Plus that’s completely hypocritical. You were almost ready to kill him for just asking you to share the exact same information. How can you expect Beren to give his intel to you?”
“No, that’s okay. I’m happy to share,” Beren interrupted. “No need to keep such intel to myself after everything I’ve been through. Relax Chantel. He’s a businessman. He has to keep his trade secrets secret. On the other hand, I’m only too happy for my intel to be open sourced for whoever wants a piece of it. The more people know the better, the way I think of it.”
And like that, the deal was struck. Condor must have thought that Beren’s information was actually more valuable than Beren thought his information was, realised Chantel. Hence his desire to trade Chantel’s private information for Beren’s intel. Whatever the reason, she would never understand the nature of trade between hackers. Chantel left Beren and Condor in the cavern, with each criminal opining enthusiastically to the other about their respective hacking experiences. Beren could never resist a bragfest, Chantel ch
uckled to herself. Now it seemed like he had finally met his match.
Chantel rubbed the Pangaea chip in her head to check that it was still in there. The extraction hadn’t been such a terrifying process. She wondered if that was what Julie had meant when she said that Condor was stealing peoples’ lives. If that was all Julie was worried about then she needn’t have been so concerned. Chantel had survived the extraction process unharmed. She certainly didn’t think it was worth causing a rift between Julie and Condor’s relationship. However if Condor was also stealing the personal information of his extractees, Chantel could see how that would be a concern. Nevertheless, Chantel decided that she would try to assure Julie that Condor’s actions were not as reprehensible as Julie made them out to be. At the end of the day, it was clear that Condor still cared about Julie and it was a shame to see them both so unhappy apart. If Condor thought that extractions were necessary for life as he knew it on the Kazaa to continue, then perhaps they were a necessary evil but a lesser evil than what might potentially be the case. There were worse crimes imaginable. It was only data after all, thought Chantel. Unfazed, she set about exploring the rest of the Kazaa, trying to find where Julie had disappeared to.
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