Vasa had been protecting the ledger with ice for nine minutes before the door opened.
She had no combat capacity and had never claimed any at all. What she had was a cold layer she could put across a physical plate to slow a hand.
Ice does not stop command armor and she had never expected it to. It costs a marshal about four seconds a plate, and four seconds is a page.
She had bought forty-one pages that way with a shoulder that had stopped working.
Ardent was tearing through the record faster than any remote backup could authenticate it.
The confederated ledger existed as physical plates in the enforcement core's northern rack. Every entry on it had been stamped through the same architecture the classification ran on.
A remote copy of a national record has to be authenticated before it means anything. Authentication takes forty seconds a volume through a spine with five open locks.
The marshal was working through whole volumes at about eleven seconds each.
