It took Rachel more than thirty minutes to make it back to the White Spear. She passed several incidents in the Old Quarter on the way. She had seen half a dozen members of the security forces trying to deal with one situation or another. Things were deteriorating in the city. Tensions were running high. Some of the patrols were having a hard time making their way through the city without being caught up in arguments, disruption and violence. This wasn't how it was meant to be.
When she finally reached her quarters, she slumped down in a chair beside her bunk and let out a long deep breath. Commander Rocker had been a strange companion, but Rachel couldn't deny that she had been highly proficient at her duties. She had interfaced with so many systems, and she had been so fast that Rachel hadn't even noticed when she had finished. A part of her worried about allowing an implant to have full access to her father's systems, but deep down she knew that it was important to understand what had happened at Mekinet News. The events at the Battle of Havers Compound had been just one example of dubious activities being undertaken by her father's news corporation. She couldn't ignore what he had done any longer. If she was to become the new owner of Mekinet News, it was even more important than ever that the truth be exposed.
Rachel leant over her bunk and picked up her console, connecting to the special access channel that Rocker had set up for her. It gave her access to all the Mekinet News Corporation's systems, offering a few dumbed-down options for non-implants, as Rocker had so delicately put it. Rachel had been impressed by Rocker's abilities. She had been around implants for a while now, and she had known that their neural implants gave them some advantages, but Rocker had completely compromised the security of thousands of systems in just a few minutes. She had played down the difficulty of hacking into such poorly maintained legacy systems, but Rachel was sure that if she had attempted the same work herself, it would have taken her months to do even half of what Rocker had achieved so quickly. Rachel wondered if she would one day be regarded as a legacy system herself. If she spent too much time around implants, she might develop an inferiority complex.
The connection opened and Rachel selected the visual logs from her father's office. Rocker had been right. He hadn't deleted any old data at all. She suddenly realised that she was holding over two decades of data in her hands. Her father had never been very good with technology. He had used consoles and data feeds in the line of his work, but he had always shown very little understanding of how they worked. He had no idea what systems sat behind the tools that he used in his everyday life. The data she had found spanned back so many years. Rachel wondered if he had forgotten that the data even existed.
Rachel sat back in her chair. She thought about everything she would need to do to wrap up all the loose ends around the Battle of Havers Compound. Many of the simpler questions had already been answered. She needed to identify the role that Mekinet News had played that day. She had been there at Havers Compound. She had seen the net-feed droids swarming overhead. What she didn't know was what chain of decisions had led to the decision to deploy them in a combat zone. That was in essence what she had to find out. If her father was implicated in that decision, she would have to report that too. She hoped that he hadn't been directly involved, but she wouldn't know the truth until she had been through a mountain of data.
She considered passing most of the work over to Rocker. An implant would be able to find the answers faster, but the data currently belonged to Mekinet News. It hadn't yet been officially impounded. Because Rachel was soon to be the company's owner, she had bypassed a lot of legal wrangling and obtained the data sooner than Central Command would otherwise have been able to. If she could find out the facts, and present her findings to Markov early, maybe he would start listening to her.
Part of her wasn't looking forward to reviewing the visual logs of her father's office. Watching him walking around his desk would bring back painful memories, but what choice did she have? Her finger flicked back through the visual logs' timeline. She didn't really have a goal in mind. Images slid across her console. She watched her father getting younger and younger as the years scrolled by, and a small smile touched her lips. She hadn't spent much time with him in recent years. More often than not Annie had taken Lisa to see her grandfather. Rachel had always been busy with her duties. She had seen him only once or twice each year.
The images looked so old. Some didn't even contain the standard embedded metadata detailing the temperature, light levels and location coordinates. People came and went like shadows passing through her father's office. He had a lot of meetings. He knew more people in Cinnamon City than Rachel would ever want to meet.
A small child came running into her father's office and jumped up into his arms. She didn't recognise herself at first. The girl was so happy and playful, just like Lisa had been before Rachel had split up with Nick. Tears spilled down Rachel's cheeks as old memories emerged from dark places. Emotions crashed into each other like waves across jagged rocks. She watched her father wrap his arms around her in a big hug. She wondered what had happened to the small girl she could see on her console. When had she become a woman? She felt like so many responsibilities had landed on her shoulders since then. The child on her console was a stranger now. The past was full of memories but so many things had been forgotten.
Rachel slid the timeline forwards, looking for something more recent that might distract her from her own childhood. When she appeared in the logs again, she was much older, even though she had thought the timeline had only moved forwards a few weeks at most. Her father smiled and hugged her again, but this time he looked troubled. He returned to his desk after she had left his office and held his head in his hands. She couldn't see his face, but his shoulders shook as though he was crying. Rachel wondered what had happened to them both over the years. Maybe later, if she could find the courage, she would watch those old images again, but for now she would have to focus on the investigation. She didn't have time for idle curiosity.
She flipped the timeline forwards to the current time and then began working backwards, day by day, wiping away her tears with the back of her hand as she searched through the entries.