Naomi spent the next three days locked away in her quarters. The XO, First Mate Dorsey, had approved her leave until after the funeral and she didn't really have much reason to leave. The Captain's daughter, she was relatively well known throughout the ship already, and leaving her quarters would no doubt involve running the gauntlet of some very public condolences.

She was struggling to process everything that had happened. Not one part of it felt real to her; neither her father's murder, or Chief's warning.

She had only just talked to her father the previous night. She hadn't known that he was missing when she entered the air exchange. And she certainly wasn't prepared to find his body in the manner that she did.

There was a part of Naomi had held out hope for a while, but the DNA results had come back from the lab within the hour. Chief had called her with the news.

Before the call, she had been expecting to break down at the news. Cry, scream, rage. Anything. But as Chief had told her the results, all Naomi had felt was numb. Numb and defeated. When he had finally terminated his call to her, promising to check back with her later in the day, she had simply lain on her bed. Her mind blank, some comedy re-run playing her quarter's vidscreen.

What was there to say? What was there to think? What was there to do?

Everything seemed pointless. None of it would bring her father back. None of it could erase the images the refused to stop playing in her head. Nothing could bring her back to the moment before she opened that service hatch. The last moment when her life made sense. When anything made sense.

Murder.

It was almost as impossible to wrap her head around that as it was her father's death.

Murder was a serious offence in the fleet. Probably the most serious. The consequences of the act went far beyond just punishing the perpetrator, who faced life incarceration in the brig. The guilty party's family was also barred from all participation in command crew positions and training for two generations. The crime did not just affect the guilty party, but their children and grandchildren as well. History was scattered with examples of high-ranking officers and families ruined by the act.

Some families never recovered from the punishment, and in all cases, it took much longer than the interdiction, often generations, for the stigma to wear off.

When all was considered, if Chief was correct in his assumption that there would be a cover-up, an innocent crew member was about to be handed down one of the harshest sentences in the fleet.

Murder, as bad as it was, came second only to treason, the sole offence in the fleet to carry the death penalty. Early rumours indicated that the Admiralty would consider treason amongst the charges. The perpetrator had killed the captain of a ship after all.

If Chief was right, then an innocent citizen might die and the livelihoods of generations of his family ruined, all so that the Burner's could gain a stronger foothold on the ship.

That was, if the Chief of Engineering was correct in his beliefs. Naomi had known about the Burner's of course. What she hadn't been aware of was how far their influence reached. But she was still struggling with the idea that such a perverse interpretation of the fleet code could gain traction within the upper echelons of the fleet hierarchy.

~

Naomi was trying hard to ignore the several flashing notifications at the edge of her peripheral vision. Her personal inbox had filled up with messages of condolence and sympathy from various acquaintances and colleagues. None from close friends, she had contacted them all immediately after she had left the scene, told them the news and explained that she wanted a few days alone to process the events. None of them had argued with her, although Sasha, her closest friend, had taken to sending her intermittent images of baby animals. She had smiled at that, and set her filters to allow them through to her primary field of vision. The other one was from her LAN, the data from the primary analysis of the crime scene data she had collected.

It had been sitting there for two days now, unopened. Naomi hadn't been able to summon up the courage to review the catalogued footage from the crime scene yet. Instead, she had tasked her LAN to scan through the drone footage, and apply a battery of wavelength filters and search algorithms to the data. It was a very rough-and-ready approach to the process and she would still need to scrub through the data in more detail, but it provided her with an excuse to avoid looking at the data. Her LAN lacked the processing power of a true SAN network, and she would need to give processing instructions and parameters for anything more sophisticated than what it was already doing.

Naomi's drone was probably the most complex piece of technology in the equation. It didn't just record video and photographic evidence, its array of sensors were able to record wavelengths across the electromagnetic spectrum and even some basic environmental data, temperature, humidity and air composition. It could provide an incredibly detailed picture of the scene. Used in conjunction with her LAN, she would be able to extrapolate a number of parameters back to the time of death.

If her father's assailant had been in the air exchange when contact with the fan was made, it might even be possible to identify some of their physical characteristics. She had detailed biometrics for her father already, which could help with that. It wouldn't necessarily be accurate enough for a positive identification. But it would be a start.

So while her LAN was doing the busywork of processing the data, she sat in her quarters.

Alone.

Her emotions swinging wildly between clawing grief, burning anger and complete apathy.It was all too much to take in.

Naomi couldn't imagine a universe without her father in it. Her mother had died when she was young, her face nothing more than a hazy blur, faded by time. They had been everything to each other. Would his face fade too?

Slowing slipping away until all the memory she had left of him was the image of his blood-stained crew insignia. Were her memories of him to be forever tainted by that blood-red veil of trauma.

In line with protocol, Naomi had already talked to a specialist in post-trauma rehabilitation about the incident. She had grunted and nodded her way through most of their conversation but now that she was alone, with the tidal forces of anger and pain tearing at her, part of her was starting to wish that she had taken the meeting more seriously.

She just hadn't been ready.

Deaths like this were a rare enough occurrence that he would likely check in in her again. Naomi was especially likely be flagged for extra attention anyway, her mother's death had been far from expected as well.

Pre-mature death on-board an arkship was very rare, never mind a violent, traumatic one.

Murder was a crime learned of only in history books, alongside such archaic crimes as witchcraft and blasphemy.

And it had been over five hundred years since the last treasonous offence; an attempted sabotage of the primary drive core in a local cluster ship, only six months distant. The plot had failed, but for five perilous minutes the lives of nearly a million crew had hung on the edge. The perpetrator had been caught, convicted and executed. To that day, his family were still unable to regain any position of consequence in the fleet hierarchy. Despite the sanctions having expired nearly two hundred years ago.

She briefly pondered over what she would say to the specialist as she lay on her cot, but there was nothing. Naomi felt everything, but the moment she tried to put words to her grief and pain, the moment she tried to make some sense of what had happened, those feelings and emotions deserted her.

After three days, she had come to the conclusion that there were simply no words to describe how she was feeling. There probably never would.

The Specialist had said the initial shock would pass soon, leaving her more open to talking, and given her two weeks of leave from her duties. She had protested the decision, she barely knew what to do on her days off at the best of times. And two weeks without any duties, stuck in her own head, replaying the scene over and over, was as close to torture as Naomi could imagine. But he had been unmoved on the position and eventually had the XO order her off duty. She had relented then; not much use in arguing with a direct order like that, and retired to her quarters.Naomi hadn't left the room since.

~

A light had been flashing in the corner of Naomi's vision for over an hour.

The data processing was complete.

She had put things off as long as she could. There was nothing left to do but look.

There were no cliffs on the fleet ships; natural formations, once as familiar to her race as the void of space was to her. But she imagined that this must be what it felt like to stand at the edge of the world. In her mind's eye, she saw a monstrously dark sea below her, a swirling vortex raging against the towering face of the cliff. Thrashing petulantly at the audacity of the rocky formation standing in its way.

Naomi took a deep breath and leapt.