Opportunity, Part 2

Jet was in my office as soon as the CSO techs had left the building. Unbidden. That surprised me a little. Maybe he was learning.

“They're done, sir,” Jet said. “And they're not happy.”

I swung my arm at one of the chairs. “Sit. Tell me the highlights.”

Jet slowly lowered himself into a seat, shaking a bit. “It seemed pretty routine on their end. I got the impression they felt this was an open-and-shut case. I guess they find a lot of Raiders using corp terminals. The corps are probably very cooperative in turning them over, too.” He glances away as he said it, maybe thinking back to yesterday's conversation.

“Most of us would take offense to a pirate assaulting the CS with our hardware, yes,” I admitted.

“The problem was,” Jet continued. “Their was no terminal trace in our system. They found signatures in our logs of the Raid runs, but they... well, they said it terminated at our server.”

“Somebody must have wiped the trace,” I said with a shrug. “Raiders are usually pretty careful.”

“That's the thing. If they had the access, they could have wiped any trace from our system at all. Left the CSO with nothing but a trail that ended at our doorstop.”

Okay, that was true. Strange. “Something doesn't add up.”

“That's exactly what they said, sir,” Jet said. “They couldn't even accuse you of collaboration. You could have done a much cleaner job. It really looks like the server itself was instantiating a Raid with no user input.”

I'm sure my face paled right then. I could feel the blood draining from my face. Damn. Could it be? What in hell had father left me with? I took a moment to regain composure before speaking again. “Very odd. I appreciate your insight, Jet. You can go.”

“What are you going to do, sir?”

I shrugged and grabbed a random object from my desk to toy with. “It sounds like there's nothing to do. CSO trace is run out. No skin off my back.”

Meanwhile, in my head: oh crap oh crap oh crap oh crap.