That man was their problem. William Oser-Hayes. There was the chief source of the venom. JR wanted to rise from the table and wipe the look from the man’s face.
The Old Man did no such thing. “Necessarily,” the Old Man said calmly “The military does have read-access. And can delete information. But black boxes… and you may check this with your technical experts, do show the effects of military access. Ours wasn’t accessed. Check it with your technical experts.”
“Experts provided by Pell.”
Oh, the political mire was getting deeper and deeper. Now it was all a plot from Pell. And the Old Man was playing cards from a hand they had far rather have reserved for court, for the lawsuit. It gave their legal opposition a forecast of the defense they had against the charges, even if it was a very good defense—an unbreakable defense in a port where the judiciary was honest.
The way in which certain members of the conference looked happier when the Old Man seemed to win a point indicated they were not facing a monolithic administration and that there was sentiment on Finity ’s side. But the fact that Oser-Hayes did all the talking and that all the ones who looked happy when Oser-Hayes seemed to score sat higher up the table indicated to him that they had a serious problem—one that might well infect the judiciary on this station. That the attack from the opposition had come from the Esperance judiciary and not from, say, the Board of Trade or the other regulatory agencies clearly indicated that the judiciary was their enemies’ best shot, the branch most malleable to their hands.
Not a fair court, JR said to himself. The legal deck was stacked, and they might lose the suit even if the other side was a no-show and the evidence was overwhelming. That they’d bullied their way into this meeting indicated Oser-Hayes wasn’t absolute in his power, that he regarded some appearances, and had to use some window-dressing with some of his power base to avoid them bolting his camp.
He was learning, hand over fist, that precisely at the moments one wanted to rise out of one’s seat and choke the life out of the opposition, one had to focus down tightly and calmly and select arguments the same careful way a surgeon selected instruments. Oser-Hayes was no fooclass="underline" he meant to provoke the choke-him reaction, which might get the Old Man to make a tactical error—if the Old Man weren’t one of the canniest negotiators alive. One time Oser-Hayes had thought he was dealing with a drowsing elder statesman a little out of the current of things: one time the Old Man had let him stumble into it, and start the meeting. They were into the agenda, after balking for hours. A parliamentary turn would see them handle it, and revert back to the top of the list before Oser-Hayes could think how to avert it.
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 running cargo in the shadow market and most probably spying for Mazian—that was a complete reversal of logic. The black boxes on which the network that ran the Alliance depended were of course suspect in Oser-Hayes’ followers’ minds; the word of Champlain against them was of course enough to stall negotiations and tangle them up in the issue of universal conspiracy, which Oser-Hayes insisted on discussing.
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.”