We’ve gotten as far up as the end of Chapter 8, but there’s going to be headwinds at some point. Ach, well. The point is to keep on truckin’.
It was not even remotely surprising to discover that Adam’s ‘software piracy’ was the most picayune stuff, ever. Fully nine-tenths of it was earlier versions of existing software, because Terrans still don’t understand that out here we need programs that have all the bugs beaten out of them. Sure, the Terran companies won’t support old versions of their code. So what? They weren’t coming out to the Tomb Worlds to do service calls anyway.
The rest of it invariably involved dueling copyrights. Earth keeps things out of public domain for far longer than the — sorry, this is boring. The point is, nothing in Adam’s server was worth sending a ship out to investigate it. Even the porn was generic.
“So why did the Redacted snap up the server?” Greg wondered when I pointed that out to him. “They’re know it’s not important, only they’re acting like it is. I get that they’re supposed to be maintaining a cover story, but they’re doing a really good job at faking interest.”
“Maybe Rubicon’s covering his ass?” I suggested. “What if the Council honestly does want to crack down on software piracy, and now that the Redacted’s really found some — with a space-happy, even! — they’re making it look as big and important as they can?”
“Not a chance, Pam. No Terran agency is going to send out a starship to track down something this trivial. Even if one of the Great Powers wanted to, they’d just handle it at the source. It’s got to be easier to crack down on thieves who are inside the Solar System, instead of outside it.” Greg shook his head. “No, there’s got to be something in that data that’s valuable to the Redacted’s real mission. The one we’re not trustworthy enough to be briefed on.”