"Always happy to help," Cornell replied as he stood up. With a nod of his head he left back for engineering.

In reply to Micaela Nieves (msg # 53):

   Maxwell turned her attention to the civilian consultant she had hired.  "Good morning.  You are here early, Miss Nieves.  Early is good."  There was no sound of good in that good morning, the news of a few minutes earlier having dampened her mood somewhat.  "Keep an eye on the reception area.  Let me know when the two troopers arrive.  I'll be in my office working up a supply requisition for appropriate duty clothing for the three of you."

Micaela looked down at herself, pulling on the cloth of the tank top.

"But if you dress me up like a narc the bad guys will see me coming."

But when she looked up again Lou was already gone. Still, the other woman hadn't yelled at her so Micaela took that as a win.

After making herself comfortable in the waiting area the young woman queried the ship again.

"Marco, does my clearance allow me to see a manifest of all military drones? I'm very familiar with the civilian drones we are carrying, but the military ones were above my clearance when this all started. If so, please transfer the data to my laptop."

Good morning Micaela. All drones on board are of the CR-9B configuration. While not a military drone in its true sense, they are versatile and can be programmed for numerous different tasks from traffic control to fighter training, and they are small, so we carry 5000 of them. Their configurations have been transferred to your dataslate. Your clearance allow you to study all their civilian applications.
This message was last edited by the player at 23:11, Wed 26 Apr 2017.

   Jenni worked on the supply requisition in her office for the few minutes she had until her two people were due to arrive.  Once it was ready, she sent it off to the Marco Polo's supply section.  The Lieutenant then powered her system down and went out to get the new people oriented.

At 0730 the two marines show up ready for duty, both glad they have been assigned to Jennifer, and not cleaning point defense guns today.
They have already managed to procure the black uniforms of ship security, and both have actually taken time to look presentable. It seems they might even be taking their task seriously.

   Lt. Maxwell was impressed with their initiative, but she wasn't going to tell them that.  "Welcome to Security.  Your first assignment will be to move your things into a couple of the rooms here.  Your hours here will be different from where you were assigned.  By sleeping in the Section's quarters, you will not disrupt their schedules and they will not disrupt mine."

   Jen took a moment to explain the room arrangements and what she wanted.  "In addition to the office and detention areas, this section has quarters designed to house three squads of people each working an assigned shift.  We are almost our own little world here."

   Lt. Maxwell smiled.  "This is where it gets complicated.  SQ1 is the office for the Duty Officer.  SQ2 through SQ4 are for the Shift Lieutenants.  SQ10 is for the Squad or Team Leader for squad one.  SQ11 is for the Assistant Leader for squad one.  SQ12 through SQ16 are double rooms for the rest of the first squad.  SQ20 is for the Squad or Team Leader for squad two.  SQ21 is for the Assistant Leader for squad two.  SQ22 through SQ26 are double rooms for the rest of the second squad.  The third squad rooms follow the same designation conventions."

   She looked right at the two new security people.  "Pvt. Ramirez and Pvt. LeBeau, your room assignments are SQ12 and SQ22.  Move your things here, get them squared away, then report back to me.  I'll give you all the nickle tour at that time.  Do you have any questions?"

"No questions Ma'am," both marines chimed in. Then they hustled off to retrieve their belongings and get set up. Pvt LeBeau shot Micaela Nieves, seated at the reception desk, a wink as he passed her.

   Jen turned her attention to the consultant.  "Now that we have the place to ourselves..."  Jen looked at her tech's attire.  "Perhaps this might be a good time to discuss your wardrobe selection for work.  The cargo pants are a good fusion of comfort and utility.  Perhaps tomorrow, you could pair them with a black blouse having enough material to cover your shoulders and all or a portion of your arms."

Micaela opened her mouth to respond, but closed it again as her brain caught up with her attitude.

"Sorry, that was not what I was expecting you to say. But, yeah, I have a long sleeve black shirt with a high neck line I could wear. Doesn't have any buttons though, so I wouldn't call it a blouse."

"Any other procedural issues that need to be addressed?" But she didn't actually let the chief of security respond.

"Look, I need to clear the air a bit. I've got no problem following orders or generally cooperating in an agreeable fashion. But I will never be part of the military machine. I get why the military disciplines its people like they do. Or, at least, part of why they do. Respect for the chain of command has to be instinctual or people could die. A military has to work as a single organism or it will fall apart. But that's not me. I have a stubborn streak a mile wide, and as soon as you ask me to stop thinking about what I'm doing I'll hesitate and wonder why you aren't being straight with me. But if you treat me like a decent human being I'll back your plays and keep my grievances to myself until we're in private."

   Lt. Maxwell looked at Miss Nieves for a long minute.  "Noted."  She looked away for a moment, then began to speak.  "Security personnel are the least liked people on the ship.  We see people at their worse, or when we suspect them of doing their worst things to each other.  Some people think they have something to hide, so they resent us for what they feel inside themselves.  Others do have something to hide and each resents us for being the external manifestation of their conscience."

   The LT smiled for just a moment.  "Let's look at you.  You came to my attention when you were poking around, unauthorized, in files related to an ongoing investigation.  I gave you three choices.  By law, my correct response should have been to lock you up pending an investigation into your behavior.  Instead, I offered you a job."

   "If I seem hard and unyielding, it's because I am.  It's because I have to be."  Maxwell pointed to the badge on her jumpsuit.  "This says that my job is to stop bad people from hurting good people.  If I had every bunk here filled, I would have fifty people to police the entire Marco Polo.  But, I don't.  I have two Marine troopers on loan and a self confessed, smart-ass civilian who has mad data analysis skills that I need."
This message was last edited by the player at 18:33, Sat 29 Apr 2017.

Micaela nodded. "Fair enough. Where do we start?"

   "We already have."  Maxwell's face turned hard again.  Cases involving genocide, murder, attempted murder, sabotage, and grand theft tended to do that to her.  "I've been assembling a list of the supplies and equipment that the saboteurs took.  The list is still growing.  And with each item they took, the questions bothering me grow larger.  Why did they take so much stuff?  Why all that trouble just to save three guys?  I have a theory.  It's waaaay past any rational explanation, but it's all I have at this moment."

   Jenni took a deep breath, then let it out slowly.  "This is a security investigation of the highest priority and the utmost secrecy.  The only people I trust with this are you and I.  I think there was a second bank of cryo units in what was supposed to be a cargo hold.  The four sleepers in the main bay worked for whoever put the sleepers in the secondary bay.  They woke up their buddies, loaded a lot of our gear, programmed the ship to kill us in a couple of different ways, and left for their fresh start."

   "Let me reassure you.  Your boss has not taken a one way flight to Crazytown.  I have reasons why this makes sense."  Jen counted off her validations on her fingers.  "First, you can't establish a viable colony by saving just three males.  Second, they stole an awful lot of equipment for just keeping three people alive.  Third, the scope of the task of getting the saboteurs aboard speaks to a large scale conspiracy, as in a governmental, political, or ethnic group working to make sure that only their people survive.  Why would they settle for just saving three of their people?"

   "I don't have enough answers yet and I really hate unsolved cases.  I don't know what to do other than send people we don't have to search every hold in the Marco Polo to look for the supposed cryo pods.  I'm open to suggestions.  Do you have any?"

   Maxwell heard the Captain's announcement.  "We need to grab on to something solid.  We're about to get underway."
This message was last edited by the player at 17:14, Sun 30 Apr 2017.

"As a matter of fact, I do." Micaela replied with a grin. "And, for what it's worth, I have come to a similar conclusion. I think there are one or more blindspots on the ship that the Marco AI is unable to see. If true, it likely has been coded to ignore the inconsistencies in its own internal schematics versus the physical layout of the ship."

"As for what we do about it, the ship is carrying a ton of small, configurable drones. By themselves they are not terribly impressive, but their module design allows them to be outfitted with a wide variety of apparatus. If I can get my hands of some of them, say, one hundred or so, I can use them to to generate a real time map of the Marco."

"I would need to set up a firewall on my laptop to keep Marco out, and a firewall on each drone before I send it on its way. Then as they send map data back to my laptop I will run that data against the current schematic. The program will then notify me when the real time data doesn't match the archive data."

"The base requirement would be to have a visual camera on each drone. But there are a number of upgrades we can do. If I can get a LIDAR module, the scan will be accurate to the millimeter. With an IR module we can track heat. Ultrasound and we can map through walls. UV and I can look for blood. Geiger and I can look for radiation spikes. EM and I can look for power spikes."

"Getting this all up and running can get time consuming though. All of the CRAB drones have a visual camera mounted on them, so getting the most basic scan up and running would probably take about 2 hours. Firewall, program, unpacking the drones, uploading the code to the drones. I can do that by myself if I can get physical access to the drones."

"Unfortunately, using any of the optional modules drastically increases the time to deployment. Normally Marco would attach the modules as the drones were taken from storage, but I don't trust the system yet, and I don't want it part of this process at any time. Getting help from some of the crew speeds things up, the modules are predominantly plug and play, but trust could be an issue there as well. Expansion of the code to handle the additional data streams would also be needed, but that's fairly simple."

"A compromise might be to get 80 drones up and running with the base configuration, then I start configuring the other 20 with modules. They can be assigned to hot spots as they come online until we have enough configured to do a second full sweep."

"Thoughts?"

   Maxwell was quiet for a bit.  "I like the idea of using drones.  How would you get past the drones past the multiples of locked and/or secured doors.  I can't envision these additional pods being any kind of easy to find.  Also, I'll need a way of justifying the use of drones to the Captain that doesn't involve looking for ghost pod people."
This message was last edited by the player at 03:11, Tue 02 May 2017.

The look on Micaela's face shifted from excited to confused.

"Don't take this the wrong way, but that's your job. Getting through secured doors requires security clearance. That I don't have. If you don't have it or can't get it then this plan is DOA. But you are the chief of security. If anyone can get that clearance it would have to be you, right?"

"As for the captain, assuming there isn't some weird military secret code of conduct, that should be pretty easy. This ship was sabotaged, and the saboteurs tried to kill all of us. The mere possibility that there is undiscovered sabotage should be enough to get his approval for a full physical sweep of the ship. You shouldn't have to mention anything about ghost pod people, just a desire to be safe and thorough. And since the vast majority of civilians are still asleep, and military personnel have no expectation of privacy, this is the best time to do that thorough sweep."

   "It's not getting the keys to the doors that concerns me, it's the physical opening and closing of the doors."  Maxwell noted.  "But in my role as Ship Security, there is the small but bothersome detail of releasing several hundred copies of the ship's master key to fly around that might keep me up nights.  But go ahead and do the prelim work.  Even if we don't use them as pod finders, we can use them to keep an eye on potential trouble spots."

Coming in a little later in the day, Blake knocks on the door to the security office and enters. He salutes.

"Hello again Lieutenant Maxwell, I thought we ought to meet up to discuss the investigation again. I've sent you several videos retrieved from the ship's security cameras, and I'd like your opinion as to where my next efforts should be focused."

   "I've looked at them."  Maxwell replied.  "I downloaded them down onto data chips for storage in evidence.  I have another request.  See if you can find some old power usage logs, from just after the ship left Earth.  I'm looking for anomalies of what would have been excessive power being used in a storage area or some other remote area of the ship.  This could be an important piece of information as to what really happened."

"Power usage logs from just after the ship left earth. Okay, I can do that."

Blake salutes and leaves for the bridge.
This message was last edited by the player at 18:38, Sun 07 May 2017.

   Jen had DNA information on two of the four perps who had committed a laundry list of felonies.  She needed information on the other two before that part of her investigation would be complete.  Since she didn't want to discuss these kind of things over the communication system, it was time to take another walk.  Maxwell picked up a blank data chip to use to store any information from the DNA tests.

   "Miss Nieves, I'm heading over to Medical to see if they have any more information to add to the investigation.  I should be back before the two other members of the unit return."


To:  Medical Section

"I probably won't be here when you return, boss." she said as she turned her focus to her laptop. "I'm going to relocate down to engineering. This will be faster to put together when I can perform real time testing on the drones themselves."

A few moments later Micaela was done with some preliminary setup and rose to her feet. "Marco, please allocate and relocate 10 drones to one of the inactive engineering bays. Please allocate and relocate 10 sets of all Type I, Type II and Type IIa modules to the same bay. Do not activate or assemble any of the components, just facilitate the physical transfer to the bay."

Then she left Security behind.

>> To: Engineering

From:  Medical Section

   Maxwell returned to the office to find that Miss Nieves had indeed left the area.  She set herself to work revising the supply requisition she had been working on earlier.  She worked from the desk in the reception area in order to keep an eye on things.

Medical===>

Hans walks into the reception and upon spotting the LT gives a respectful nod.

"The reports you wanted Lt, I apologise for the wait but medical was swamped his morning."

He slides the data stick over the reception counter.


The two men you asked me to look i to were Jack Wallace, 38, sewage worker from Boise Idaho, and Azim Amir, 32, electrician, from Paris Idaho.

He sniffs and frowns.
"Both,of course,are not in their pods...I also did some follow up onto the bone density scan and reexamned the bullet wound on the first cadaver.
I hypothesis that the bone density of the skull was weakened by possible anti-grav environments,that is speculation however so take that with a pinch of salt."

   "Thank you for both the information and the work it took to get the information."  Maxwell took the data stick.  "I hope we don't have any more reasons to conduct shipboard forensic research."