Naomi sighed and leaned back into her chair. The drone footage hadn't provided her with anything she couldn't have figured out from being at the scene.

The action of the air exchange fan had altered the atmosphere, and the evidence, too much. Her LAN lacked the advanced processing capacity to extrapolate backwards using the air filtration data; too many moving variables. There only new information had come from the air exchange logs; a slight increase in the atmospheric temperature at the junction, right around the estimated time of the crime.

The fluctuation was congruent with there being more than one person in the chamber at the time of her father's death. Both of them alive.

Her stomach heaved at the thought of her father being alive when he had been thrown into the fans. Not just a disposal or a statement then. It was the means as well.

'That might be something to talk with my counsellor about,' she muttered as she read through the last short report her LAN had generated. She closed the readout and stared up at the ceiling.
By all accounts, it seemed like a fairly straightforward series of events, not much to go on with regards the identity of the killer. Whoever it was, had been careful not to leave any trace of themselves behind.

She didn't have access to the ship's video feeds for the surrounding area at her level of clearance either. That was about the only other avenue of investigation that she could conceive of as bearing fruit.

Unless of course, the security team's physical sweep of the area turned up some obscured evidence, and she didn't hold out much hope for getting her hands on that.

Naomi crossed the room and settled back into the hollow of her sofa, disheartened again. It appeared whatever faith Chief had in her was going to prove unfounded. She had rarely, if ever, felt so useless, so out of control of events in her life. Every time she tried to get somewhere, it ended up feeling like she was rubbing salt in her wounds.

A message notification flashed in her vision again, Chief's image appearing as she accepted the call.

'How are you doing, Ensign?' he sounded surprisingly concerned for a change, his default attitude towards everything seemed to be detached brusqueness, it was unlike him to talk to anyone outside of the remit of work.

'As well as can be expected Chief. I would be better if the XO hadn't ordered me off on leave. Now I've got nothing to do but sit in my quarters thinking.'

Naomi's response was frank, she had worked with Chief enough to know dodging the issue was only going to draw him on more. Business-like he might be, but he did look out for the well-being of his crew.

'That thinking needs to be done, Ensign. We need you ready and able to cope under pressure when you return. You'll put other people at risk if you're distracted and restless, Which I assume is your current state of mind?'

'Got it in one, Chief.'

'Then you are not ready to return, as much as you would like to get your hands dirty again. We have protocol to follow before we can allow you near critical systems again.'

'Understood, Chief,' she responded glumly.

He wasn't letting her get away with it either. She let herself sink back further into her sofa.

'I do however have a small job that could do with seeing too. It appears that some of the video feeds in the maintenance transport pods are acting up. SAN is reporting data loss in the signal. Only about an hour's work, nothing mission critical as it were. I thought you might like a chance to get out of your quarters.'

'But you said...'

'I said you shouldn't be near critical systems Ensign. But I think you can handle a short network diagnostic and some rewiring. You may as well learn something while you are out on leave. It will give you a head start on our electrical systems. You can even do most of the diagnostics from the terminal in your quarters. I'll patch you through for temporary access to the feeds and data stream. Schematics for the system have been sent to your public drive. You'll have just over an hour until that authorisation expires to diagnose the system. That should be more than enough time.'

'Chief...'

'Your access is limited. You've got two decks to work with, Three and Five. Should be enough to find the problem. I can't give you much else, large parts of the system have been cordoned off by Security for the investigation. Get to work Ensign.

'Oh and one more thing, I heard from a friend in the med bay. Your father's time of death has been confirmed as Second Shift, 00:27. You were on duty on the other side of the ship at the time. There was nothing you could have done to stop it. I hope that helps.'

He signed off and she was left alone in her quarters, her heart racing.

Had Chief just given her access to video feeds that could help in her investigation?

There was no reason to expect she would find much in the video feeds, but at this stage Naomi would take any grain of hope she could.

~

She only had an hour, but with the time frame he provided her, it should be more than enough.He had also left her with no time to make a decision.

The more he interacted with her on this, it was becoming obvious he had some kind of agenda, and she was unsure about getting caught up in whatever it was that he was planning.

But it was also an opportunity.

If Chief was right, and the Burners' agenda had spread as far as he suggested, any video evidence might soon be tampered with or removed. Especially once they set their sights on a scapegoat for the crime.

That was if it hadn't been interfered with already. She would need to keep an eye out for signs of tampering as well.

She sighed.

Analysing media feeds was not part of any training she had. She had no illusions about being able to tell the difference.

Naomi pulled up the terminal on her desk and connected to the security server Chief had given her access to. The holographic screen split into three segments, the video feed, the data feeds, including temperature, air quality and chemical breakdown of the air composition, and the schematics for the monitoring system.

In order to tamper with the system effectively, the data for both the video feed and the corresponding climate data would have to be altered. If that data did not match the corresponding video then any changes would immediately suspect.

Alterations to that data would also need an extremely high-level security clearance and there were very few circumstances that allowed changes. Naomi knew from her experience on the bridge that no one person on board the ship had such clearance. It required clearance codes from three of the four authorised officers on board the ship.

Her father had been one of them. The XO, the Chief Engineer, and the Head of Security made up the rest. In the unlikely event that she did uncover tampering, it would implicate all three of those remaining officers. Or worse. It could point to a significant security vulnerability in the ships critical systems.

She was unsure which possibility she dreaded more.

Naomi shook her head and dismissed the thought. It was purely hypothetical and extremely unlikely in any event. It would take an immense amount of coordination and effort to pull off any degree of tampering in that system.

The much more likely scenario would be induced interference in the area around the maintenance elevator. A strong enough electromagnetic source in the area could scramble the video feed, and would also interfere with the environmental sensors.

That would eliminate the need to doctor the video and sensor data by rendering all of it unreliable in the first place. Such interference would leave behind its own footprint, but the suspect pool would be much, much higher.

If that was the case, she would have a lot more to work with. She didn't have the necessary expertise herself, but she knew someone who did. If they could isolate the nature and frequency of the interference, that would make it theoretically possible, even if extremely difficult, to reconstruct the feed.

Naomi cursed herself. She was speculating again, without even having looked at the data. Extrapolating answers from her hopes rather than from concrete knowledge of the system, which she most definitely did not have.

She closed her eyes and took a moment to steady herself.

~

Looking back at the screen, she requested the security feed and data for the time period one hour before and one hour after her father's death.

She played through the video feed quickly, waiting for something to happen. The first forty-five minutes of playback were completely routine. No one had used the maintenance elevator during that time, matching the ship logs for the same period. The environmental sensors also aligned with the recording; the empty elevator remained at the ship standard environment maintained by the climate systems.

Forty-five minutes in, the system logs reported access to the elevator. The access was unscheduled, insofar as it wasn't generated in response to a error. Nothing unusual, about that. Manual access could be requested if a crew member was investigating a fault that hadn't triggered the system.

It happened all the time, just as she diagnosed a minor sensor issue in the airlock the day her father had been killed. Trainees were also allowed access if they were looking to study a specific part of the ship in person; many preferred looking at the real thing rather than a holographic projection.

The system recorded the doors being opened, but before there was any visual of someone entering the pod, the video stream became scrambled.

Naomi glanced at the climate data stream and laughed out loud as the numbers shifted randomly on the screen in front of her. Her speculation hadn't been that far off base it seems.She tried to switch the view to the external cameras outside the lift, but was denied access. Looks like Chief's authorisation was more limited than I thought.

They had likely been scrambled by the same device anyway. It would have been pretty sloppy in an otherwise precisely executed operation.

The scrambled feed persisted for another hour, at which point the systems once again started to record data; the pod idle on Deck Three with the doors closed. The first entry in the data log at this point was the system registering the pod's environment re-stabilising.

She saved a copy of the video feeds to her personal storage, and instructed her LAN to scrub through the video, attempting to isolate and define the frequency of the interference.

The climate data feed itself was a total loss; whatever device had been used to scramble the lift had completely disabled the sensors for the duration.

She leaned back in her chair and groaned. So much for that avenue of investigation. Even if her LAN was able to discover the source and nature of the interference, she knew from her own work on corrupted nav data that it would be impossible to unscramble the video feed without access to the device used.

She had done the same process thousands of times during her training, using multiple sources and sensor readings to clean up distorted images and data. Without the external validation, she might as well attempt to reconstruct it with a random number generator.