Rami looked at the other two, got nods in response, and cleared ter throat. “We were working on RaviHyral, for Tlacey Excavations, one of the smaller Umro contractors. We do mineral research and technology development.” Te explained that they were a collective of technologists, seven of them plus dependents, who traveled from work contract to work contract. The others were waiting in a hotel suite, with Rami, Maro, and Tapan having been deputized to act for the group. It was a relief to hear that their mining experience was in tech and research; in the mining contracts I had had, the techs were usually in offices off the pit site or adjacent to it, and we didn’t see them unless they got intoxicated and tried to kill each other, which admittedly was rare.

“Tlacey’s terms were great,” Tapan added, “but maybe too great, if you know what I mean.”

ART did a quick search and returned the opinion that it was intended to be a figure of speech. I told it I knew that.

Rami continued, “We took the contract because it would give us time to work on our own stuff. We’d had this idea to develop a new detection system for strange synthetics. RaviHyral has a lot of identified deposits, so it’s a great place for research.” Strange synthetics were elements left behind by alien civilizations. Telling the difference between them and naturally occurring elements that were previously unidentified was a problem in mining. Like the remnants of alien occupation/civilization uncovered by GrayCris on my last contract, they were off limits for commercial development. That was all I’d ever needed to know, since every job I’d ever had involving alien material was just me standing around guarding the people who were working on it. (ART tried to explain it to me and I told it to save it for later, I needed to focus.)

Rami said, “We were making good progress, but then suddenly our group got terminated with no notice, and they took our data—”

Tapan waved her hands. “All our work! It wasn’t anything to do with our contract—”

Maro finished, “Tlacey stole it, basically, and they deleted the most current version off our devices. We had copies of the older iterations, but we’ve lost all our recent work.”

Rami added, “We filed a complaint with Umro, but it’s taking forever to process it, and we don’t know if it’s ever going to come to anything.”

I said, “This sounds like something you should go to a solicitor about.” It wasn’t unusual. The company data mined, too, but it wasn’t as clumsy or obvious as to try to delete the work from the original creators’ devices. If it did that, then the creators wouldn’t come back and enter into more security bond agreements, which would give the company access to whatever they were working on next.