Naomi closed her eyes. It was all just too much. She needed time; time to process; time to mourn; time to breathe. Her mind was racing, repeating the scene of her father's death over and over.

Everywhere Naomi looked, she saw conspiracy.

She didn't trust herself out in public. It felt like everyone was watching. Waiting for her to make a mistake. So she stayed locked away in her quarters.

Naomi knew she couldn't stay there forever. But right then, she was finding it hard to care. Hiding away was easier than feeling eyes on her back of her neck, or constantly listening out for approaching footsteps when she was alone.

The security system didn't help her anxiety.

Whoever killed her father had a way to circumvent that system. And if what Chief told her about the security team was true, her quarters was the only place she wasn't under constant surveillance. Even that wasn't a guarantee now.

Her eyes jerked open, the imagined scent of blood and gore drifting to her nostrils, and a sudden sense of claustrophobia seizing her.

I'm in my quarters, not back in that damn maintenance shaft.

But the truth was, she had never really left. Part of her had been left behind in that small corridor, pressed against the wall, cowering away from the reality of what she had seen.

And part of that place had followed her home, latching onto her and refusing to let go.

Naomi stood and tried to shake it off; pacing the room vigorously as she tried to forget the smell, the blood, the scrap of fabric with her father's rank insignia.

Naomi was tired, scared and angry. But right then it was the anger that dominated her thoughts. She cursed the inadequacies of the crew training protocols. Truth was, not that many people ever really experienced any serious trauma. And training officers and critical systems crew to operate under extreme circumstances, when few, if any would ever experience anything even remotely close, was difficult.

The sims felt real enough, and coupled with the correct cocktail of drugs, they felt real. Real enough that some of them had given her nightmares for months afterwards. Waking her up in the night, damp with sweat, and screaming. She had been trained to cope with death, shock and disaster, but somehow now, none of it was enough. The reality of grief, of the hollowness she felt, of the pain that clawed at her throat, you couldn't train someone for that.

Naomi had to admit that the training had given her perspective, a certain level of insight into what she was feeling. There was a distance between her and the pain. In the beginning it had taken the edge off what she was feeling, but now, scalding tendrils traversed that space, leaving her feeling raw and exposed,

She screamed in frustration as she paced past her desk, her eyes screwed shut, face twisted in anguish. Naomi slipped to the floor, her grief forcing its way out in burning tears and harsh, choked sobs.

How can everything change so much, in such a short time...

How can he just be...gone..

The barriers Naomi had built crumbled, and the space between her and her pain contracted until nothing remained of it. Suddenly awash in that swirling torrent of emotions. She gave into it. Allowed herself to be carried away. Allowed it to flow through her, until everything was scoured away.

~

When Naomi came back to herself and opened her eyes again, the answer was staring her in the face.

Blinking to clear her vision, she leaned closer to the holographic console screen, the ship's environmental readout slowly drifting into focus.

The last lines of the log jumped out a t her.

*Doors closed

*Seal complete

*Initiate climate re-stabilisation

There was another way to get the information she needed.

The ship kept all enclosed environments consistent. This included the interior of the transport pods. As soon as the door to the pod had closed, the system had re-established the baseline environment. If she could analyse the changes that had happened once the door closed, she should be able to recover the environmental data, and maybe even an approximation of the environment over time.

She didn't have the data from inside the lift with the killer, but she didn't have the data on the system before and after the jamming occurred. The presence of her father and his killer in the lift would have varied the atmosphere over the duration of the ride, causing minor variations in the oxygen: carbon dioxide ratio, temperature and humidity.

She had her father's baseline medical data, if she could figure out a way to model the changes in the interior environment, she might finally have some detail about his assailant.. It wouldn't be accurate enough to ID the suspect, but if it worked, she might at least be able to narrow down the suspect pool.

Naomi pulled the re-stabilisation data from the feed and saved it to her personal drive. She didn't have the expertise to do any modelling that complex. But she knew who did. The only question that remained was did she want to involve her in this?

She quickly scanned through the video feed again. It was impossible to tell where the killer had gone after they exited the pod on Deck Three. The scrambling started on Deck Five and ended on Deck Three. They could easily have taken a pod from another part of the deck to leave the scene.

If she had the recovered environmental data from the elevator, it might have given her an outside chance at extracting some detail, but it was a longshot. The most she could hope for was estimates of sex, height/weight range, approximate age and, if they were careless, a chemical signature from perfume or scented hygiene products. They may have been trace chemicals from the suspect's place of work, but that could be easily planted or accidentally picked up by simply walking through that area of the ship. The system wasn't built as an infallible panopticon, it was only a useful, and very limited, consequence of its primary function of maintaining the life support environment.

She leaned back in her chair and sighed. That was as far as she was going to get with the video feed anyway. At least until she decided if she was comfortable with the risk inherent in bringing Sasha on board to run the analysis for her.

She felt cheated, she had the killer right in front of her, only obscured by whatever scrambling signal they had used. Impenetrable or not, it was one single obstacle between her and her father's filler.

Naomi's LAN had given up trying to isolate the jamming signal by now. The frequency appeared to be fluctuating within a large range and was proving remarkably hard to crack. The murderer knew what they were doing. If they were good enough they might have corrupted the video feed enough to render it completely useless even with SAN level computing capacity. She was getting the feeling that this would be the case.

Closing down the logs and diagnostics windows, Naomi started to prepare her report on the diagnostics. She tentatively identified the interference as the result of a mobile EM signal, beginning on Deck Five, and moving to Deck Three and lasting for a duration of sixty-thee minutes.

She added as section detailing her effort to trace the signal, highlighting that her LAN had hit a brick wall on its tenth pass and deemed the data loss ratio too high to continue.

A device like that was illegal across the fleer and Naomi finished the report by referring the matter directly to security.

She forward a copy of the report to Chief, and informed him that she would also need to check the sensors directly herself. The interference had been short-lived and normal operations had mostly resumed once the signal cut off, but she had identified a number of minor errors in the climate sensors after this.

Disheartened, she ended her access to the security feeds, her LAN had finished downloading everything she needed anyway. Another dead-end, at least for now. It would be dangerous to bring her friend in on what she was doing. Nothing she was doing would directly interfere in the security team's investigation, but that didn't make it acceptable either. And it would put Sasha in danger if the stories were true and the Burners decided to escalate their activities. Naomi wasn't sure she could accept another of her loves ones getting hurt. Especially if they were only helping her.

Her normal instincts would have told her to pass on her info to security and let them decoded the data, unfortunately, if what Chief had said was true then it was unlikely that they would ever even try.

Naomi wished that she had more access to the feeds, even a few of the closer public feeds on Deck Three. Her data was so parse as it was that anything additional would have been a huge boon.

Her LAN finished loading the data from the pod on Deck Three and flashed a notification in her vision. It was an extreme longshot trying the analysis herself, but she wanted to at least do something, even if was only to fail, before she dragged Sasha into anything.

It was requesting parameters for the analysis. She pulled up her father's biometrics from the system, plugging them in as a baseline for one of the parties on the lift. She instructed it to take the systems atmosphere stabilisation changes when the scrambling stopped subtract his medics profile from the dataset. She sent the command to start the analysis and a counter appeared in the corner of her vision. Sixteen hours. She lay back in her bunk.

Nothing left to do but wait.