My wait didn't take long when Zhiva appeared at the cell entrance right after Garan's return.
"We need to discuss something," he said, interrupting Trey's incessant ramble about the mundane trivialities of his former life.
I knew the reference to 'something' too well, but I feigned ignorance.
"Urgent?"
He nodded his head and his eyes swept through the room towards the surveillance cameras.
Trey, being the regular moron, glanced at both of us and then said, "What is it which you both can't discuss here?"
Zhiva glared fiercely at him, enough to intimidate him into silence. I jumped off the top bunk.
"Let's go." I walked past him and turned towards the end of the cell block.
Zhiva followed behind, with heavy footsteps, highlighting the severity of the problem.
"How do you get all those jamming bugs installed?" I asked, pointing to the location of the camera.
The question had a point. It's showing him what I'm capable of.
"So you can see them because of the implant in your eye?" Zhiva asked.
I nodded.
"What about Trey?" He continued.
I shrugged. Trey's limitations are a known fact to me, but if there's an escape plan involved in the following discussion later, Trey needed to look useful.
I also needed Zhiva's answer to scope a backup escape plan. Never just go with Plan A. Always go with Plan B and C.
"Back to the jamming bugs. How did you install them?"
"Insiders within the guards, but not high up. Plus, Garan goes in and out of Sector 8Q to help with treatments whenever guards are injured. Space pirate docs are valuable. That's how we got our medical supplies," Zhiva replied monotonously.
Insiders. Whatever political connections Zhiva has or has had may be useful. No matter how high up or low down they are.
A group of Perunians already gathered in his cell, sitting on the floor with Garan lounging on the bottom bunk, like some big boss on a chaise lounge.
Garan, at the sight of me, immediately sat up.
Before I could open my mouth, Garan asked. "Can you hack?"
He didn't need to elaborate further. The droid bug already transmitted the information into my neural memory core, every image and every voice recording to me.
I mused over the mention of hacking, which is easy for me.
Most species, aside from the Tamtuns, have a lot of vulnerabilities in their information systems. They definitely wanted me to hack into the main processing core.
"Hacking isn't a problem, but you might have a problem," I replied.
"What do you mean?"
"Look around," I said as I surveyed the cell. "Notice anything missing?"
Zhiva sat up straight, raising an eyebrow at me. "What?"
"Hacking equipment."
They can smuggle almost anything in, but parts of hacking equipment would be hard to smuggle into an Ultramax, where we couldn't even have anything to write with.
Garan pulled a tablet out from the pillow lying at the head of the bed and offered it to me.
"This is the hacking equipment."
I took the tablet from his hand and glanced at it, allowing my optical implant to sweep through the structure.
[Item detected: Super processing unit with air hack]
[Origin: Perunian]
[Core unit: 164 main processing cores]
[Encryption capabilities: anti scrambling units, bypass modules]
Really, not that fascinating. The two droids hidden in my mouth had better capabilities than some primitive tablet.
"Before I agree, haven't your men tried?" I asked.
."All of us tried to clear the firewalls but there's a few which sets off an alarm. Given that the Kamuy used cybernetics, your capability may be well enhanced to see where the problem is," Garan said.
"What are you looking for?"
"Next transport details and names."
"Transport?"
Why transport? Then I recalled the droid bug's memory of the guard mentioning the possibility of a change.
"Better to be prepared."
"What if your names are on the transport?"
"We plan to escape once the penal colony ship leaves Shoah, and that's why we also need to know the planet they are taking us to."
Saying is easy. Escape? They can barely even hack into the main central processor of Shoah Ultramax.
If they could hack the system, it meant they could also communicate with their pirate fleet in space.
Then Garan leaned back again, with a troubled expression. "The transfer the other time were loaded with psycho Satesian killers. Thirty of them sent on the orders from the higher up."
"Easier to finish us off in the sewers if they want to kill us," I scoffed, sceptical of his claim.
I witnessed the effect of the sewer sample on the Satesian. The sewer would be the perfect place to kill us.
More convenient for the guards since they would be busier clearing dead bodies in the hall compared to the ease of flushing our bodies into the sewers.
If I wasn't wrong, the sewer would be equipped with what I call a mincer, to grind our bodies up into tiny sanitised dust particles to dump into the vacuum of space.
Those tiny dust particles would not clog most vents of incoming ships, designed to blow space dust away.
The engineers designed most space stations with docking systems this way to chuck waste out that way from the bottom.
"They can't send us to the sewers because certain Perunians are watching," Zhiva answered with a smug look on his face. "As far as they are concerned, we can do no wrong. And they fear whatever is in you may send all of us off to the next life."
Those certain Perunians stationed in the Ultramax may be the ones in charge of surveillance. That may explain how they got contraband items inside.
I didn't recall seeing any Perunian guards when they brought us Trey and me in, only Velesian and Haolian guards. Only the one which accompanied Garan.
Come to think of it, I didn't see many Perunian guards on the battle fortress which brought me to the Shoah system.
"Remember, the old Perunians suck at fighting." Zhiva pointed to the surveillance cameras with a wink. "We have other talents too. Not just looking pretty."