The Data Trade
The travel from Underground server bunker, Sector 9 to Tarmac of the abandoned spaceport hangar consumed the next hour. Headlights cut cold through the gathering dusk.
The hangar’s cavernous space swallowed the echo of the blast door’s seal. The metallic thud vibrated through Lucas’s boots, a period at the end of a sentence he refused to accept. The overhead lights had cut to a dim emergency amber, casting long, jagged shadows across the tarmac. The air already felt thinner, denser with the promise of nitrogen.
Four minutes.
Sofia stood frozen, her hand wrapped around Jace’s small arm. The boy’s eyes were wide, fixed on the sealed door, his breath coming in rapid, shallow gasps. Sofia pulled him closer, her voice a tight wire: “Lucas.”
He was already moving. The spaceport hangar, abandoned for a decade, was a graveyard of rusted machinery and scavenged parts. His eyes scanned the debris field, calculating, discarding, cataloging. A row of corroded cargo loaders. A collapsed office trailer. A tangle of conveyor belts leading up into the darkness of the ventilation shaft.
The vent. It ran the length of the hangar, a three-foot-wide metal throat, its grille long since pried off by scavengers. He could see the opening, a black mouth twenty feet up the wall, accessible by a rusted maintenance ladder.
“Sofia, get Jace behind the loader. The big one. Don’t move until I say.” His voice was a flat code, stripped of emotion. He was already crouching beside a broken compressor unit, its guts spilled across the concrete.
She didn’t argue. She pulled Jace, herding him into the shadow of the massive yellow machine, her body shielding his.
Grant’s voice crackled over the hangar’s intercom, tinny and amused. “Three minutes, thirty seconds. Tick-tock, Harlow. The chemical scrubbers are offline. Your lungs will start to burn in about ninety seconds. After that, it’s just a very quiet nap.”
Lucas ignored him. He found what he needed. A compressed air cylinder, still with a reading on its gauge—1200 PSI. It was meant for a pneumatic wrench, not a weapon. But it was a means of acceleration.
He pulled the decoy drive from his pocket. The actual Aldridge data was on a hardened chip inside his jacket lining, sewn into the seam. The decoy was a dummy, a standard USB drive he’d loaded with encrypted junk files from an old satellite feed. It looked real. It was the right weight. It had the right heat signature for a portable storage device.
He wedged the air cylinder into the crook of a conveyor belt frame, angled it toward the open ventilation shaft. He had a length of steel tubing, a near-perfect launch guide. It was crude. It was desperate. It was the only move he had.
“Cole,” Lucas said, his voice carrying in the dead air. He didn’t shout. He spoke directly to the intercom speaker mounted on the support column. “I know you’re listening. Grant is a child playing with a timer. You don’t want the code on the drive. You want the code that’s in my head. The one that will open the backdoor into your satellite grid and turn every Aldridge asset in the Pacific into a paperweight.”
A pause. The air was beginning to feel stale. Sofia coughed, a single, sharp sound.
Then Cole Aldridge’s voice replaced his son’s. It was a smoother, more dangerous instrument—a cello to Grant’s kazoo. “You’re stalling, Mr. Harlow. But I admire the attempt. You have two minutes.”
“I’m proposing a trade,” Lucas said, fitting the decoy drive into the steel tube. His hands worked with the precision of a bomb disposal tech. “You open the door. You let my family onto that scramjet on the tarmac. I give you the access code for the backdoor. The real one. The one that will let you crawl into your competitors’ systems and bleed them dry.”
Silence. The air was thickening. Lucas could feel the edges of his consciousness starting to dull. He had to force his focus.
“And why would you give me that leverage?” Cole asked, his voice low with interest.
“Because the Aldridge network is already cracked. You know it. I’ve seen the architecture. Your encryption is a decade old, built on a skeleton of obsolete protocols. The backdoor I designed is the only way to fix the breach I already made. Without it, you’re rebuilding from scratch, and you lose three years of market dominance.” Lucas eased the decoy drive into the tube. “You get my family on that plane, I give you the key. It’s simple.”
A long, humming silence. The emergency lights flickered.
“Grant,” Cole said, his voice sharp. “Open the blast door. Let the air cycle.”
A metallic groan. The door began to rise, a sliver of white light cutting the darkness. Fresh air rushed in, thin and cold, laced with the smell of jet fuel from the runway. Sofia let out a breath she’d been holding. Jace trembled against her.
Lucas didn’t relax. He watched the door, calculating.
“You have sixty seconds to reach the jet,” Cole said. “I want the code before your wheels leave the ground.”
“You’ll have it when I see Jace in the cabin.”
Lucas pulled the steel tube, the decoy drive loaded inside. He aimed it at the dark mouth of the vent. With a sharp twist of the cylinder’s valve, a deafening blast of compressed air shot through the tube. The decoy drive launched like a bullet, disappearing into the ventilation shaft with a clatter of plastic against metal.
Grant’s voice came over the comms, panicked. “He’s transmitting! I’m tracking a device in the ventilation system!”
Lucas grabbed Sofia’s arm. “Go. Now.”
They ran. Across the tarmac, the scramjet sat waiting, its hatch open, a thin trail of exhaust vapor curling from its rear thrusters. Silas was already in the cockpit, running pre-flight checks. The hangar door was fully open now, the runway clear.
Sofia pulled Jace up the boarding ladder. Lucas followed, his boots hitting the metal stairs, his hand reaching for the hatch release.
“Code, Harlow,” Cole’s voice came through the phone in Lucas’s pocket.
Lucas stopped. One hand on the ladder. One foot on the tarmac. He looked back at the hangar, at the dark column where the intercom was mounted.
“The backdoor is activated by the phrase ‘Iceberg Protocol,’ logged under the root directory of the Aldridge mainframe. It will open a tunnel through your firewall and give you access to every satellite uplink your competitors control.”
He was giving him a real code. A real backdoor. One that would cripple the Aldridge network if activated, but not immediately. It had a latency bomb. A two-hour delay. Enough time for them to reach international waters.
Cole’s voice was smooth, satisfied. “Good. Get on the plane.”
Lucas climbed the ladder, pulled the hatch shut, and sealed it. The cabin pressurized. The engines spooled up, a high whine that vibrated through the fuselage.
Silas’s voice came over the intercom. “Clear for takeoff. Hold on.”
Sofia strapped Jace into the seat, her hands still shaking. She looked at Lucas, her eyes asking the question she wouldn’t say out loud. *Is it over?*
Lucas didn’t answer. He sat down, buckling in, his eyes fixed on the window. The hangar receded. The tarmac blurred. The jet accelerated, lifting off with a lurch that pressed them into their seats.
They were airborne.
Sofia let out a sob, pulling Jace into her arms. The boy was crying, silent tears tracking down his face. Lucas watched the coastline shrink, the lights of the city fading into a gray smear.
His phone buzzed. A text from an unknown number.
*“Run.”*
It was Silas. From his personal line.
Lucas’s blood went cold. He looked up, toward the cockpit. The door was closed.
“Silas,” he said into the intercom. “What haven’t you told me?”
A pause. Then Silas’s voice, low and tight. “Cole isn’t letting you go. He never was. Grant is on a separate frequency, coordinating with a hunter-killer drone. Ground-based. It’s painted on the scramjet. They were waiting for you to give the code.”
Sofia heard it. Her face went white.
Lucas was already unbuckling, moving toward the cockpit.
“They won’t shoot us down,” he said. “Too public. Too messy.”
“They don’t have to shoot you down,” Silas said. “They just need to disable an engine. Force an emergency landing. Somewhere very quiet, very private.”
The jet banked hard. A warning light flashed on the console.
“RADAR lock,” Silas said. “They’ve got us.”
The cabin shook. A metallic ping echoed through the fuselage, followed by a thud. Something hit the starboard engine.
Lucas slammed into the cockpit door, shoving it open. “Where can we put down?”
Silas pointed at a screen. A small island, barely a dot in the Pacific. “There’s a mining strip. Abandoned. It’s our only chance.”
“Do it.”
The jet descended, engines screaming. The island grew in the window, a rocky scar on the blue water. The landing strip was cracked, overgrown, barely long enough.
The landing gear hit the tarmac with a bone-jarring impact. Sparks flew. The jet skidded, hydroplaned, then stopped, tilted at an angle on a collapsed tire.
Silas killed the engines. Silence, save for the ticking of cooling metal.
“They’ll be here in minutes,” Silas said. “Grant will come with a tactical team. They’ll secure the area and eliminate witnesses.”
Sofia was white. Jace was silent, his small hand gripping his mother’s.
Lucas looked at the phone. At the unread message.
*“Run.”*
He stepped out of the hatch. The air was salt-crusted, hot. The island was a volcanic lump of rock, scrub grass, and rusted mining equipment. No cover. No escape.
He pulled Sofia and Jace out. They ran toward the wreckage of an old cargo loader, a rusted hulk that had once hauled ore. It provided the only real cover on the strip.
Lucas’s phone buzzed again.
Cole’s voice: “I lied. You didn’t think I’d let you live? The code is good. But you’re a liability, Harlow. You know too much.”
Lucas knelt, pulling Jace behind the loader’s massive wheel. Sofia crouched beside him, her hand over Jace’s mouth, muffling his sobs.
The sound of rotors. A helicopter, coming in low over the water. The hunter-killer drone, a dark metal bird, circled above, its sensors scanning.
Lucas saw the muzzle flash before he heard the crack.
Sofia screams as a sniper round shatters the glass next to Jace’s head. Lucas tackles them behind a cargo loader. He spits blood and looks at the phone: ‘Cole… you lying bastard.’