The Privateers

Are you making a backup of me

If there was one thing that I learned, flying for the Coalition, it was that nothing ever happens without being recorded.

Now, that's a sentence with a lot of meanings. No Coalition carrier or colony will let you take three steps without a camera trained on you. It's half intimidation and half liability. They want to know you're not doing anything stupid, because stupidity is a more potent weapon than ever, this century. But more than that, if something bad does happen, and they have the footage that proves it was your fault and not theirs, that's less reason for the authorities to come after them and it gets you out of their hair. The evidence is everything.

But picture this. You're sitting at the bar on board some backwater mining rig on the far side of Phobos, and some guy sits next to you, bragging about how many of "those damned earthers" he smashed in his Centurion. "Might even win this war myself," he proclaims. And you know damn well nobody from Earth's been spotted this far into the frontier in years, but maybe he's got an entertaining story behind it, and you're only a few sips in, so what the hell, you ask him. He starts going on about having had the honor of leading a counter-insurgent squadron, lost both his wingmen on one sortie, baited one of their space-planes into launching a heat seeker and led it in circles until it hit them in their own ass. Story I've heard a dozen times from a half-dozen different people. But of course there were no witnesses, and a braggart like him never turns his flight recorder on because the jig would be up in seconds. You and half the bar agree: it never happened. He'll never prove it.

By this point I've amassed a few entire memory cards' worth of flight logs, conversation audio, and transcripts. I'm not so much looking for an easy-out in courts or litigation. Mostly, I just don't trust my own memory. A witness is fallible. Pliable. Corruptible. A flight recorder? Might be your best chance at figuring out who really blew up your BDA squadron.

If only you'd remembered to take a backup before handing it over to the Colonel.

If my ten-year-long hunch is right... the bastard probably wiped it.