Marcus closed his eyes. The transaction logs. Of course. Elena had been skimming from the trust for three years—tiny fractional amounts from millions of transactions. The vault would have shown the discrepancies. But if the vault was gone, only the logs remained. And if she controlled the logs…
He logged in remotely.
The terminal blinked back. $ systemctl restart edtm-db-listener Failed: Unit edtm-db-listener.service not found. He frowned. Not found? That was impossible. The listener was a core daemon. He checked the process list. Nothing. He checked the database directory. Also nothing.
No authentication challenge. No MFA. Just… deletion. As if the storage array had been told that the command came from God.
Silence. Then: "Marcus, that vault held the past seven years of mediation records. Every settlement. Every trust disbursement. Every signature. If it's gone…"