He led me to one of the holographic screens where a progress bar was slowly filling up, which was an indication of the progress of the decryption of a single file.

The thing was that the progress bar showed that it was still at two percent despite the 'time elapsed' to be nine hundred and twenty two hours.

Damn… At this rate, this would take more than five years for it to be completed. No wonder this guy wants me to help him with it.

I turned to him, "Just saying… I have no guarantees that I will be able to decrypt this."

He shrugged, "Even if you fail, I won't lose anything. I have a copy of the file here so use this instead."

He then tapped on the console which prompted a data chip to slide out from it and he handed it over to me.

I took the data chip from him and raised an eyebrow, "So… You just want me to try and hack into this thing?"

"If you can. I'm honestly not expecting much so it's good enough for me that you try it."

"And that's payment enough for your help with my personal terminal?"

"Yes."

I narrowed my eyes at him, "Wait a moment… You've been trying to decrypt this file for more than a month now and at the rate that it's going, you might be stuck trying to do so for the next five years. If I manage to crack it right now, I would have literally saved you five years of waiting so I think we should get a lot of compensation for this, right? Shouldn't we discuss about that first?"

Bimic grimaced, which told me he actually thought he had full intention of trying to get this cheap labour out of me from the very start.

What a cheapskate.

He sighed, "Alright… But what would qualify as payment for this, assuming that you crack it and that the file behind this encryption isn't just a bunch of useless junk?"

I turned to Amber since she might know the value of this stuff better than I do.

Amber thought for a moment, "Hmm… You're here to do corporate espionage against one of the corporations here, right?"

The guy immediately stiffened before choking out, "I… Ahem… I don't know what you're talking about…"

"Mmhmm… I'm going to guess another corp hired you to come all the way here to dig up dirt on another corp."

"N… No? I already said I was hired to search for illicit dealings on this station."

"By another corp, yes, yes, I know. You were hired by a corp to sabotage another corp, just admit it."

"That's… Not true."

Amber rolled her eyes, "Oh please, are you actually trying to tell me that some good samaritan actually paid money from their own pocket for you to come here and expose the shady dealings going on within this station? If that was the job, you wouldn't even need to hole yourself up here. You could just stay in the hangar bay and browse through the station's net to get all the information you need. The only reason you're here is because you're trying to find logs that would incriminate a specific entity within the station itself."

He clucked his tongue, "Figured you would have experience too… Fine. I'm here for that, but I can't tell you who my client is nor who I'm targeting, ok? I'll lose my credibility if I did that."

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"I don't need to know the name of the two corps, I just need to know how big the two are."

Bimic paused for a moment, "Pretty big."

I was going to say that didn't really answer the question but apparently it did for Amber as she nodded, "Alright. I'm assuming they're paying you by the quality of the information that you're giving them and not a flat fee?"

"That's right."

Amber lips curled up to a grin, "Alright. Then we'll claim ninety percent of the fee that they would transfer to you if you were to sell this information to them."

Even I was taken aback by the number that Amber gave so it went without saying that Bimic was outraged by her suggestion.

"Ninety percent?! That's outrageous! Fifty percent!"

Amber turned to me and I realised she was literally just giving a ridiculous number to set the floor for me to start bargaining with him since this was my area of expertise.

I crossed my arms, "That would only be acceptable if I was cutting your waiting time by half. Since I am cutting more than that, it needs to be more. Eighty five percent."

"If it wasn't for me taking this job, you would not be able to get money from selling this file either! Fifty five percent!"

I looked around, "Hmm… I'm going to take a guess that you aren't the only one that this company hired to dig up the dirt, correct? I can just reject your offer and go dig through the servers myself before looking for any other hackers that are also working on this to sell it to them for a higher price. Eighty percent."

"Argghh! Wait, wait! How about sixty five? I'm willing to cooperate and not give you any trouble! The others might even try to shoot you in the back once you trade that away and then take their money back from your corpse!"

I raised an eyebrow at him, "And you won't?"

"Bloody hell, if Whisper Tale was willing to guide you to my doorstep, that means she owes you something. If she knew I offed you, I would definitely end up in her bad graces and I can kiss my ass goodbye."

"Fair enough. Still too low but I am willing to go seventy five percent because you helped me with my personal terminal."

"Seventy! That's the best I can do without going into deficit for the maintenance of my equipment!"

"Alright, deal."

I stretched out my hand and he shook it, completing our agreement.

I then removed the data chip and adaptor I had plugged in my Codex and replaced it with the data chip he had handed me instead.

First thing I did was to run a virus scan on it to make sure there was no malicious code present in the chip itself and only when it returned clean did I go ahead to bring up the hacking menu to start decrypting it.

I completed the hacking process in about a minute and I was now looking at what appeared to be several video files.

I almost opened one to watch what the video was but decided against it and simply pulled the data chip from my Codex and handed it back to Bimic.

He took it from me and frowned, "What? Was the security impossible for you to crack or something?"

I raised an eyebrow, "No? It's already cracked. It contains some video files apparently so go ahead and play it or something."

His eyes widened comically, "What?! Wait… What?!"

He's so surprised that he had to say 'what' twice huh.

Bimic then ran over to another console and slid the data chip into a socket, prompting a holographic window to appear in the air.

Like I had told him, the file was already unencrypted and several video files were displayed within the folder itself.

The hacker gulped audibly and tapped on the screen which caused one of the video files to start playing.

The video showed a man dressed in a black suit that had seen better days as it was tattered and torn at the seams as though someone had beaten him up. A light was shining over his head which cast a dark shadow on his face, obscuring his facial features from view.

He was seated on a chair with his limbs bound to said chair and blood was dripping from his face to splatter against the floor, which was already caked with blood.

A voice started speaking from someone out of view, "Councillor, all we're asking is for you to help us give an order that would help our ships pass through the area unhindered. It wouldn't even bother you and we would even pay you for it. Is that too much to ask?"

No response came from the councillor.

The voice spoke again, this time sounding a little bit more frustrated, "Why the stubbornness, Councillor? You do know that even if you don't agree to this, we can just get rid of you and potentially replace you with someone else that would just do as we say anyway right? We are all civilised people here so we're even willing to give you an opportunity to benefit from this instead of just being disposed of? Wouldn't that be a preferable outcome instead?"

Still silence from the guy that was tied to the chair.

"Very well then. Perhaps if we were to pay a visit to your wife and daughter, they might--"

"Don't…" The councillor finally gasped. "Not… Not them… I'll… I'll do it…"

The video then stopped there.

Well fuck, what did we just find ourselves involved in?