Rachel buried her head in her hands. Her own mother had left her when she was just a child. Hadn't she done the same thing to Lisa, only in a different way? She hadn't abandoned her daughter, but how often had she been there when Lisa really needed her? Rachel realised that she was becoming her own mother, despite all her efforts to the contrary.
To distract herself, she picked up her console and searched for the maintenance reports that had been sent in by Beacon Station during the last two years. Most of the reports had been written by Nick chambers. He had run Beacon Station during the time that Rachel had been there. His reports were untidy, but they told a damning story. They contained details of all the equipment that had failed, all the crew that had died on operations, and all the supplies that had gone missing or been stolen. Only three of the six Crocs had been operational for most of the time, and they had all been repaired with the wrong parts so many times that it was miracle they worked at all. Beacon Station's inventory only showed a quarter of the weapons and body armour that it was supposed to have been allocated, and there was no natural food at all. The crew had been eating nothing but synthetic food for the last two years.
The reports had been sent monthly. Each painted a more dire situation than the one before. In total there had been 138 requests for replacement parts and supplies. Thompson had ignored them all. If it hadn't been for Harris responding to the most urgent requests, Beacon Station would not have been able to function at all.
Rachel wondered who was running the station now. She entered a search on her console and a name popped up on the display. Commander Pam Restler had been put in charge after Nick's death. She had already submitted requests for over a dozen replacement Croc parts and more powerful munitions. The requests had been put on hold by Commander Kendle, though no reason had been given. Rachel combined the old requests with the new and sorted them by cost. She authorised every request that cost less than a thousand credits, and then picked a handful of the more expensive items that looked urgent. She authorised one hundred body armour suits at a cost of fifteen thousand credits, and two replacement Plasma Cannons for the damaged Crocs. The Plasma Cannons were fifty-thousand credits each. Rachel pushed the authorised requests through to the tech factories so the items could be manufactured and delivered to Beacon Station as soon as possible. It was a small thing, but she knew that it would make a real difference to the men and women of Beacon Station.
When the wall console buzzed, Rachel looked up and saw Commander Melanie Rocker standing in the corridor outside. She leant forwards, pressing a button on her desk and then watched the door sliding up into the ceiling in front of her.
'Come in,' Rachel said.
Rocker stepped into the office and stood looking at the desk, her eyes drifting across its surface. 'Is this a bad time?' she said.
'No. Take a seat.' Rachel pressed the button on her desk again and the door slid shut once more.
Rocker sat down in the only chair on the opposite side of the desk. 'I came to update you on my analysis of the Mekinet News systems,' she said.
'So soon?' Rachel said. 'You must work faster than me.'
Rocker offered a half smile and gestured towards the lump on the back of her head. 'I have a few advantages,' she said.
Rachel sat back and rubbed a hand across her face.
'I can come back later if you'd prefer,' Rocker said.
'No. I'm okay. Go ahead. What have you found?'
Rocker's eyes came into sharp focus, looking straight at Rachel. It was strange having eye contact with an implant. Rachel almost shied away from her gaze, but the experience didn't last long. After a few seconds, Rocker's eyes lost focus again and drifted across the floor. Rachel let out a quiet sigh of relief.
'Your father knew Riser Trent was a hacker,' Rocker said. 'That was why he employed him, to find information that more scrupulous types couldn't find.'
Rachel offered a glum expression. 'I thought as much.'
'But he wasn't responsible for the illegal use of the net-feed droids over Havers Compound. Not directly, anyway.'
Rachel listened. She had to know how involved her father really was. She wanted to understand what he had been thinking.
'I've been through all the comms messages between Trent and your father,' Rocker said. 'They had an acrimonious relationship. You could almost say that they despised each other.'
'Okay,' Rachel said, leaning forwards on her elbows.
'It was Trent that found out about the mission at Havers Compound. He told your father, and of course your father was very interested. It was news. He wanted it for his viewers, and he wanted to sell the story to other networks. Conflict always equates to potential earnings in the media business.'
'Sadly,' Rachel said. 'I never understood my father's fascination with such things. Do you think he'll be blamed for all this?'
Rocker hesitated. 'That would depend on the findings. From what I've seen so far, I can see no reason for him to be held responsible for what happened.'
Rachel wondered whether Rocker was telling her the truth. Were implants capable of empathy? Was she putting a colourful spin on events to paint her father in a better light, or was she just reporting the facts like a machine?
'It was Trent that demanded access to the net-feed droids. Your father was reluctant to provide them, but Trent can be very persuasive when he wants to be.'
'I can imagine.'
'The net-feed droids are old technology,' Rocker said, 'but they gather a lot of information.'
'That's why Trent wanted them,' Rachel said. 'So he could broadcast the combat operations live.'
'Yes, but they record more than visual and audio information. They record all kinds of data in enormous volumes.'
'What kind of data?'
'It's all sent back to a Drop Ranger, a kind of relay station. I managed to gain access to the data through the Mekinet News systems. There's so much information in there. It's difficult to know what to look for. If we have a question, the answer may well be in the Drop Ranger, but without the question, it's all just meaningless noise.'
'Drefnig said that somebody at Damen Trent's apartment had been transferring vast amounts of data too. Was that from the Drop Ranger?'
Rocker tilted her head to one side. 'Let me check his reports. Yes, I have access to the network logs for the apartment now. I'm running a check... The data matches. If that was Trent then he was recovering the same data.'
'Why would he do that? Hasn't he already got what he needs? He broadcast the combat operation live. If that was his aim then the other data would be of no use to him now.'
Rocker looked up at the ceiling, her tongue tracing her upper lip as though she could taste something in the air. 'I don't know,' she said. 'It's difficult to see things from his perspective.'
'If he's still going through the data, he must be looking for something?'
Rocker said nothing.
Rachel traced her fingers along the line of the desk and then activated her console. She typed a series of commands into the projected keypad and brought up Drefnig's original reports from the raid on Damen's apartment. 'Hmmm,' she said.
'Something wrong?'
'I'm looking at Drefnig's reports. He recovered some memory cubes from the apartment. The data looks useless, based on the analysis that he has done, but there was some software on the memory cubes too. He doesn't say what it was. Can you access that?'
'Yes, I see it.'
'What is it? What does it do?'
'It's nothing standard. It looks like Trent wrote it himself.'
'Why?'
Rocker frowned. 'It looks like some kind of pattern matcher.'
'Was he processing the Drop Ranger's data with it?'
'Possibly. There's no way to know for sure. He could have processed any data with it.'
'What patterns do you think he might have been looking for?'
'One minute... Okay. It looks like the software is looking for energy fluctuations with distinct characteristics.'
'Were his results on the memory cube as well?'
'No.'
Rachel placed her hands in her lap. 'I have an idea,' she said.