Finity's End

They were talking. They had accomplished that much.

But this talk of technical experts provided by Pell as a source of suspicion… this talk of deliberate sabotage by agents from the capital of the Alliance—as if the Alliance government and Alliance-certified technicians would likelier be the source of misinformation and duplicity, not some scruffy freighter ru

Whatever the Old Man’s blood pressure was doing at the moment, there was no sign of it on his face. And the Old Man came back with perfect calm.

“Would you prefer those experts provided by Union, sir? I don’t think we can access them. But Boreale can certainly attest every move we’ve made. And the next ship arriving in this port from the Mariner vector will most assuredly reflect exactly the same information, as surely the stationmaster of Esperance knows as well as any ship’s captain—unless, of course, our technical experts have gotten in and altered the main computers on Mariner, then accomplished the same with seamless perfection on Voyager in ways that would withstand cross-comparison for all future ship-calls at any station in the Alliance—”

“Sufficient time to have gotten signatures on documents is all you need.”

“Ah. Is that your fear?”

“Apprehension.”

“Apprehension. Well, in respect of your prudent apprehensions, we have the precise case number that will pull up previous complaints on Champlain , including those that will have different origins and dates than any ship-call we’ve made. To save your technicians, I’m sure, weeks of painstaking effort…”

Weeks only if the technicians meant to stall.

“That is something our military status can do somewhat more efficiently: access case numbers. In this case, the last stamp of access on the complaint itself will be the court at Mariner.”

Hours of meeting and they hadn’t even gotten to the agenda. In that sense, William Oser-Hayes was making all the political capital he could, and JR wagered with himself that behind the scenes Oser-Hayes had people working the records, excavating things with which they could be ambushed, burying them at least beyond access within this port, although the very next ship to call at the station would dump a load of information which would restore the missing files.

The Old Man hadn’t mentioned the fact, but a military ship had the means to take a fast access of a station’s black-box system. JR remembered that suddenly in the light of the local resistance. Finity under his command had taken such a snapshot when they’d come in, a draw-down of station records and navigational information exactly as they’d been at the moment of their docking.

It was a convenience, only, in these tamer days. Any ship that had recently left the station for other space contained the same information, regularly uploaded on leaving one station to download at the next. It was the getting of the information immediately on arrival that was the military prerogative… because a military ship might be called to action on an emergency basis, in which event it might not have the ten or so minutes it took to receive the total update. They’d drawn a feed when they came in; and they’d draw another any time they liked. Again, military prerogative, useless to ordinary civilian ships, which couldn’t read their own black boxes: most people didn’t routinely think about it, although he was relatively sure it was no secret from station administrators that military craft did that.

At the next rest break, he passed an order to Bucklin on his own and without consulting the other captains. “Store the on-dock black-box information in the secondary box. Do a simultaneous back-up to safe-cube. Have you got that?”

“Yessir.”

“Second step. Take a daily feed from station, at the same time. Run a data comparison. Every day.”

They were alone, in the foyer of the meeting area, and Bucklin had with him a piece of electronics very hostile to bugs.

“You think they’re going to fix station records !” Bucklin asked.

“I think it’s remotely possible. Any change in archived files, I want the appropriate section leader notified and given a copy. If they try to change history or wipe a record, I want to know it. This is all a quiet matter. This Oser-Hayes is no fool. He could be doubling from Union—and Union itself has factions that might be counter to Boreale’s faction.”

“Tangled-er and tangled-er.”

“Very much so. Some faction or corporation on Cyteen Station might want Esperance to break out of the Alliance; Boreale won’t act on its own; and it’s very likely the Cyteen military will back us and the trade agreement with Pell. The result is in their interest. Their trading interests won’t universally like it. Their station-folk will. It’s far from settled, and my personal guess would be that Cyteen’s military would like it to be a done deal before Cyteen’s more complex factions find out about it: it wouldn’t be the first time they’ve acted to pre-empt their own legal process. I think Cyteen military, like that carrier back at Tripoint, wants us to get this agreement through. But Oser-Hayes doesn’t.”

Bucklin nodded. “I’ll relay that. I’ll sub in Wayne here till I get back.”

It was the first decision, JR reflected, as he watched Bucklin go to the door and call Wayne back, the first administrative decision he’d made in his new-made captaincy—one which might duplicate what someone had already ordered, but if it did, the more senior captain’s instructions would take precedence. If it conflicted, he would hear an objection. He didn’t think he’d hear one over the extravagant expense of one-write safe-cubes, which themselves were admissible in court. In the meanwhile, if that information wasn’t being collected, he wanted it. The facts were vulnerable to technicians, if to no one else, and Oser-Hayes might have cast aspersions on the honesty of the Pell-trained technicians who maintained the black-box system on Esperance, but it didn’t mean Oser-Hayes might not subvert one tech to do something about damning evidence. Like financial records.

The tone in which Oser-Hayes said Pell made it likely that distrust of the central government and of Pell was a driving force in Esperance politics.

Distrust of this place, this station, this administration was becoming his.

They’d been to the vid zoo. They’d seen all the holo-sharks at the Lagoon. That was two major amusements down on the first day.

They went to supper, in the moderately posh Lagoon, which Linda and Jeremy had both wanted, where colored lights made the place look as if they were underwater, and a sign advised that the same disposable contact lenses they’d used in the exhibit would display Wonders of the Mystic Lagoon, purchasable for a day’s wages if you hadn’t brought your own.

The junior-juniors were tired. Fletcher wanted the bubble-tub back in the sleepover. In his opinion it was time to go back to the Xanadu and settle in for the night. It was well past main-dark and the dockside, which never slept, had gone over to the rougher side of its existence: neon a bit more in evidence, the music louder, the level of alcohol in the passersby just that much higher.

But Jeremy moped along the displays, and wanted to stay on dockside a little longer. “I’m not sleepy,” he said.