Wilson Port, Tewanta - 3306-08-14 15:49 GST
Sergeant Hugh Brown of Wilson Port Security Services stood outside the door of a small apartment in Cromwell Ward. Pavel Singh, from the forensics team, was just starting recording the state of the murder scene inside. Officers DeBrun and Wallace were keeping back the curious locals at a checkpoint at the end of the corridor. The sergeant was waiting for the detectives to arrive. Until forensics were done and detectives had done an on-site inspection, protocol dictated that the crime scene needed to have a police guard. In addition, if the detectives weren't able to conduct witness interviews that day, it was customary for the station security beat cops to gather statements. He hoped that wouldn't be necessary in this case. He had better ways to spend his time. His team had a lead on the location a pop up pharmaceutical laboratory that was packaging a cocktail of stimulants and vasoconstrictors as an aphrodisiac. Sergeant Brown had no problem with aphrodisiacs generally, but this one was particularly unsafe, leading to a recent string of heart attacks and strokes. The lab ought to be shut down while the chemists were still working in it. However, the longer he was tied up here the more likely that the chemists will finish up for the day, making the arrests and prosecutions more difficult.
The sergeant popped a lozenge into his mouth and scratched the red stubble on his chin. The lozenge flavour helped him push back the metallic smell from the blood. There was a lot of blood. A woman had been stabbed: two deep wounds, leading to death from blood loss. Before she died she had written a message in her own blood on the wall. Sergeant Brown always rolled his eyes when a situation like that occurred in cheesy detective story vid-dramas, but here it was, in real life, in this case. The struggle had been brief but vicious: from the splatter patterns on the walls and ceiling, it appeared to the Sergeant that the attacker had inflicted the two wounds in a single fluid motion. Pavel's analysis of the splatter patterns and wound depths would likely confirm that, and give an estimate on the attacker's height, weight, and physical build. The victim had managed to discharge a Nadion NL-G1 Laser Shield. Technically, it was a non lethal weapon. It was a stubby single shot short range laser pistol, resembling a knuckle duster, that scanned a 150 degree solid angle cone in front of the weapon in about 200ms, inflicting second degree burns on anyone within 3m. If used point blank, it could burn down to the bone, and given the minimal flash burns in the apartment, that was likely what had happened. Sergeant Brown wondered how badly injured the attacker was and whether they had sought medical attention on the station. He was considering subscribing to the Suspicious Injuries station alert channel, when the detectives arrived. It was Geldof and Freamon. Sergeant Brown groaned inwardly: these two were great detectives but could be a total pain in the rear end, at times.
Detective Imelda Geldof was a short woman, 150cm tall, in her late twenties, with a slight build and short dark hair cut in a bob style. She wore a loose fitting black jacket over washed out green overalls, which were tucked into her shin high mag-boots. It was a style favoured by maintenance workers on the station, particularly amongst those who worked in the lower g environments. She carried a mid sized shoulder bag made of heavy duty military fabric, with about a dozen button style badges pinned to it, mostly emblems of local punk bands. Detective Brendan Freamon, in contrast, was a tall man, 190cm, in his late fifties, with a mid skin tone, and a mid length bushy greying hair pulled back into a pony tail. He had a wispy goatee beard, about 4cm long, and wore a smart dark grey tunic and trousers combination, that was an unofficial uniform for station security detectives. The two detectives displayed their IDs to Officer DeBrun, who waved them through without inspecting either of them.
"What have you got for us, sergeant?", asked Detective Geldof. "It better not be like the other frakking wastes of our time today."
"That good a day, huh?", responded the sergeant.
"Afternoon Hugh. It has been a frustrating day so far. Two unfruitful cases.", responded Detective Freamon.
"Unfruitful? That's one frakking way of putting it. Examples of bureaucratic frakking incompetence would be more frakking accurate."
"Bureaucratic incompetence?", asked Sergeant Brown.
Detective Freamon shot him a warning glance and subtly shook his head, sensing a long invective filled rant coming from his partner.
"Bureaucratic frakking incompetence of the highest frakking order.", replied Detective Geldof, oblivious. "Our first case today, was investigating a teenage riot that occurred this morning in Armstrong Square, outside the Human Beans coffee shop. Some frakking station brats got into a fight with some other frakking station brats that had just come out of Chandra's Tea House."
"That's not normally something detectives would get involved in.", replied Sergeant Brown, in a puzzled voice, "Normally we'd check the surveillance camera footage, round up the culprits and their parents, and give them a stern warning: scare them back to the straight and narrow."
"That's what normally would frakking happen, yeah, but in this case they security cameras had shut down just before the fight."
"Firmware update?", asked Sergeant Brown.
"If only", remarked Detective Freamon.
"No. It turns out the station security cameras have some dodgy components and are prone to overheating. Rather than repair or replace the cameras the OTO technicians noticed that the cameras color spectrum started to shift towards a particular red frequency as they started to overheat. They updated the firmware to shut down the camera for ten minutes to let it cool down, when the sensor started to register a lot of that color. That fixed their camera failure problem at the cost about ten minutes of downtime in a week. Unfortunately, at some point after that, someone figured out that firing a low powered tightband comms. laser into the cameras would shut them down. Which is what one of the station brats did before the fight."
"That sounds like bureaucratic incompetence, alright!", exclaimed the sergeant.
"Oh! I haven't reached the frakking bureaucratic incompetence yet. So I figure this out from examining the station logs, reading the source code, and running an experiment on the frakking camera in question. I send a message to station frakking maintenance about the whole 'cameras rebooting when they think that they're hot thing'. About twenty minutes latter, I get a message back, that says they knew about the OTO firmware update already, and that they didn't think it worthwhile to fix the cameras, as it was only ten minutes of missing coverage per week, which was within the service level objective. That's the frakking bureaucratic incompetence!"
"Oh!", responded the sergeant.
"Yeah! So, we were a little annoyed, but thankfully we got another case.", interjected Detective Freamon.
"Yeah. And it looked like a frakking promising one, too. Do you remember George Smith?", asked Detective Geldof.
"The guy who was injured when OTO tried to smuggle nerve agents onto the station?"
"The very same!", continued Detective Geldof. "So, we get an alert that someone had broken in to his apartment. We arrive there with Sergeant Gilberti and a few of his team, and catch the guy in the act. He was vacuuming up skin flakes and hairs from Mr. Smith's bed. He'd already gone through the air filters and recycler and gathered up organic material from there and stored it into little cryo flasks. We haul him back to the station to interrogate him. He asks to speak to his lawyer, so we give him five minutes. He makes a call to a ship in the docks and recites a forty word code in phonetic alphabet, and hangs up. Barely two minutes later, our frakking legal department puts in a direct holo call to us, ordering us to delay the interrogation until his frakking lawyer is present. So we wait. Two hours later an Orca with five lawyers from Starstone Enterprises arrive. We go to the large interrogation room. However, instead of there being just us and the suspect, we have his five lawyers and two of ours, as well. The lawyers sling documents over and back for about thirty minutes, after which our lawyers tell us that we have to let him go. As an agent of Starstone Industries it would breach a set of multi-laterial contractual agreements if we held him, exposing the Protectorate to hundreds of millions of credits in liabilities. So he walked. We did sterilize his equipment before giving it back to him, though, which he wasn't happy about. That was an hour ago."
"What was he doing there?"
"Randomius frakking knows! We couldn't even investigate that. The captain was asked to back off investigations around Smith, and since it was Hiroko frakking Watanabe, of BPIA, doing the asking we didn't have much choice. It stinks, though."
"So sergeant, what do you have for us then?", asked Detective Freamon.
"A murder. Double stab wounds. Victim was a woman in her early forties, Miriam Golden, a recent immigrant from Alliance space, like yourself, Brendan."
"So far, so frakking ordinary", remarked Detective Geldof
"So far, we have found out that she worked as a quality assurance automation specialist at one of the nearby food cartridge fabrication plants. Her neighbours said she was nice. Quiet, but friendly. Kept to herself. Never had callers and never let anyone into her apartment."
"Still sounding like something you guys can follow up on, on your own.", said Detective Freamon. "Anything else?"
"She bought her apartment outright when she arrived. Traded two tons of uncut low temperature diamonds for it."
"A bit more interesting. Anything info from Immigration Services?"
"They interviewed her and decided she was low threat. Another refugee from a war torn system that decided to move somewhere more stable."
"So far, it is sounding like a jealous boyfriend case, i.e., a waste of our time, and something you guys can run down on your own.", Detective Freamon replied.
"She fought back with a Nadion Laser Shield.", the sergeant responded desperately.
The two detectives looked at each other, eyebrows raised.
"Okay! That's frakking interesting. Can we see the scene?"
"If Operative Singh is finished up, sure!"
Sergeant Brown opened up the door to find Operative Singh piloting some drones.
"Hey Pavel! Can I let the detectives in?"
"I am done with the initial passive scans and volatiles collection, so everything will be fine so long as they don't touch anything or get in the way of the drones.."
"Hey Pavel.", said Detective Geldof as she entered the crime scene.<7p>
"Hey Imelda."
The body of the victim lay in a pool of blood, not far from the door. Her Nadion Laser Shield lay in the pool and a short message was daubed on the wall in blood.
"'They hunt Prime'! Does that mean anything to anyone?", Detective Geldof asked. Nobody replied.
The victim was still wearing her factory overalls. Just home from work, Imelda guessed. The murderer was already there when she got home. The wounds were on the side of the right side of body and and left inner thigh: the liver and femoral artery were the targets. The killer knew what they were doing. Detective Geldof looked around the apartment. It looked neat and tidy, spartan even. Some flash damage from the Nadion in the kitchen area on the lower walls, but a surprisingly little of it. So little, that she should be looking at two corpses. Most things in the apartment were functional, very little decorative or personal. There were two small tasteful artworks hanging on the wall: the sort of stuff that was fashionable in the Alliance. No clutter. A single cup, bowl, fork and spoon were sitting by the food dispenser. The victim probably didn't interrupt a burglary then. The detective spotted an unusually large portable computer deck on a shelf in the living area. Few people had a use for those: most people used their hand terminal to access computing capacity provided by the station. It was much cheaper that way.
"Hey Pavel! Can I borrow a drone to look at that computing deck over there?", she said as she pulled out her hand terminal.
"Sure", he responded, handing control over to her terminal with a quick hand flick in her direction on his own terminal.
Detective Geldof piloted the flying drone over to the computing deck that she had noticed.
"Randomius! It's a frakking Dell Sendai portable computer!", she exclaimed.
"A what?", her partner asked.
"A Dell Sendai portable computer: you could run an outpost station off one of those and still have compute capacity to spare. They're top of the line, very frakking expensive, a few million credits, at least, and totally out of place here. Definitely not a burglary case: even an idiot would have recognized that as worth stealing. And the fact that she had the Nadion, indicates to me that she was expecting trouble. It still could be a jealous boyfriend, but even if it was, this lady has some secrets. Way too much money to be working in a factory, for starters."
"I guess we are taking this case then?", Detective Freamon asked.
"Oh, for sure! Yeah! Something odd is going on here. It's a proper mystery."
Just then, then was a distant thud, that they felt through their boots. The lights flickered. Emergency lighting kicked in.
"What in Aaren frakking Djeebus' name was that?", Detective Geldof asked.