Midway: Chapter 6

  “Grandpa!!”  It was late in the evening when Johannes returned to his family quarters.  In reality it was his daughter and son-in-law’s suite, but he’d been living there the last two years or so with them since his wife had died.  His seven year old grandson Zarif and nine year old granddaughter Setia were excited to see him again after he had been gone all day.   He was usually the one to watch them when their parents were off on duty and it was not school hours.  “We missed you!  But uncle Tycho has been teaching us how to play chess!”  Zarif proudly exclaimed.

  “Well, trying to teach them how to play chess anyways,” Tycho chuckled.   “So…” he asked, “how’d it go Johannes?”  In his teens when Tycho was newly asserting his adolescent independence he’d started calling his father by his first name.  They’d fought about it for years but eventually Johannes gave up and by that point it felt weird when Tycho tried to call him ‘Dad’ again after he felt he’d ‘won.’

  The old man hugged his grandchildren even tighter.  “You know what?  I really don’t want to talk about it.”

  Tycho just shrugged.   “Alright… well Kirana and Seth said they’d both be back in about forty-five… er,” he looked at the clock in the kitchen, “make that about half an hour from now.  The kids have eaten so… I’m going to take off now, alright?”

  “Sure.  Thanks again Tycho.”

  “No problem, bye kids!” he added as he gave a last quick tickle to Zarif as he passed by the two children again.

   

  In the morning, while Johannes, Kirana, Seth, Zarif, and Setia were all sitting down to breakfast together, the door chimed the announcement of someone on the other side.   Johannes thought the door open and in walked Anaru Tynes, looking cheerful but nonetheless a little bleary-eyed and sleep deprived.

  “Good morning Bowlands, how are we doing today?”  He received the requisite hellos and non-committal responses as to how they were doing.  ‘Good’ seemed to be the most popular response.  “Wonderful.  Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to borrow your grandfather for a moment, alright?”   Johannes nodded at him and then got up from the table, and together they went into his private bedroom.

  “Johannes, I uh… I had trouble sleeping last night after everything, so I thought I’d get a little leg work done for you and save you some time.”

  “Oh… oh okay well that’s great, what have you found?”

  “Well, I found out that Dhika was still awake so I asked her to meet up with me in the dining hall.  We went through the personnel records and together we put together a list of the people that we think were capable of pulling off hacking into the Brainchip logs, and manipulating them without being detected.  That got us about thirty names.   We then went over the Brainchip logs that do exist, and cross referenced those names against the surveillance footage.  We were able to eliminate twenty or so by confirming that they were where the logs said they should be at the time of the murder.  That is of course, based on Min’s twelve hour window around the estimated time of death.”

  “I appreciate that, but if this person can manipulate the Brainchip logs, then-”

  Anaru put up his hand to stop him and pursed his lips.  “I know, I know.  But Dhika assures me that manipulating the video itself even a little bit, would be impossible without detection.  She doesn’t think that even she could do that.  She said that it would take a physical manipulation of the records, as opposed to simply breaking an encryption like with the Brainchip logs.  Just in case though, she’s running a trace program over the video logs to look for anomalies.  I’m not sure what she means by all that, but I trust her judgment.”

  “Well me too, so we’ll have to go with that for now.  Wait, how much did you tell her?”

  “I told her about the murder.  I know you wanted to keep it quiet but we’re going to need her technical expertise and secrets don’t keep for very long on this ship anyways.  I trust her not to tell anyone else though.”

  “Fair enough… I can’t think of any reason to doubt her discretion in any case.”

  “Right, well I was able to strike another three off of our list personally since they were with me at my weekly card game the night it happened.  That left us seven names, only four of which are men.”

  “Four hunh?   Alright, let me see the list,” Johannes said and looked it over after being handed the scroll.  Each was as impossibly suspect as the rest.  “Okay, well we need to set up an interrogation room, and arrange interviews for everyone on the list.  I’ll need a set up for clear video recording of their faces while I question them, okay?  I need to be able to go back to the recording and look for micro expressions which could reveal deception.”

  “Right.