If it weren't for the fact that he'd been sending messages from terminals at multiple different sites, Chuck would suspect that there was something wrong with the ship's comms; but, no, the Kusari Navy had responded promptly with their condolences. Gulping back his loss, Chuck forced himself to continue on.
Diplomacy was great, and Chuck still had the mindset of a Zoner even if he'd lost the affiliation, but how the hell did you exercise it if no one would even talk to you. Alright, yeah, it had been overly optimistic to think that he'd be able to get the Maltese to set aside their prejudices, but at least he had tried. Not his fault that they were just as stubborn as their reputation claimed. He still couldn't see how restricted access to a black hole was going to hurt their security, especially with what he was sure they would have assigned him, but, it was their space.
He had hoped for more from people that he had classified as allies in his mind, but apparently, the Liberty mindset was at work even here. Then, again, they never said what liberty they were claiming, did they. He'd give it one more try, and see if someone would at least talk to him in person. That had seemed to work for Jake when Neural Net correspondence hadn't.
First, though, he needed to safeguard his research. He'd been hoping to have secure storage on Ames by now, but that odd Recipient not Found error had come back right before the announcement that the station was under new management. Those folks didn't seem to want to have anything to do with him, either. A bitter chuckle, more snort than laugh, escaped his lips as he realized that whoever IRG was, they were based in Liberty, too.
Thought turning toward the memories of all the places he'd landed over the years, Chuck went looking for a place to hide his data in case things turned sour. Liberty itself was out; his relations with the legal side were all impersonal in the fashion of any customer, and the less than legal was turning out to be the same. In other times, he might have turned to the Hessians or Corsairs, but they had both been less than brotherly recently; another snort at the irony. Bretonia had been the closest that Star had to House stomping grounds on a regular basis. Maybe he could contact Gateway Shipping; they'd done a fair amount of supply to the base and he knew several of them personally.
