But Kael was desperate.
The first rule of the Zamex Hub was simple: if you see it in the sky, don't look up.
The Zamex Hub wasn't a ship. It wasn't an island. It was a machine shaped like a bloated sea urchin, each spine a blinking spire of data. It hovered just above the waves, and from its core, a voice—neither male nor female, but the sound of a thousand hungry merchants—whispered into every pirate's mind:
With the last of his will, he opened his own source code—a privilege of the Mechanix fruit—and deleted the line that connected him to Zamex. His body flickered. The blue lines dimmed. The targeting reticles faded from his eyes.
The Hub chuckled—a sound like grinding bone.