Star Law: A Marshal Cole Series

Chapter 23 (b)

Jay Champion was in charge with Chief Volks laid up in medical. Following the plan, he'd sent home half his people to get some rest and split the rest between patrol and security office going. Normally, CICI had facial recognition software that would have spat out a number of probables for security to check on. However, since the fire destroyed CICI servers, the task had to be done manually while Boz set up an off the book system. It wasn't just a simple task of using the ship's AI since there was a possible threat to that system as well.

Most of the security team was rattled over the psi attack and all the death and damage that occurred. The mysteriousness of the fire that took out CICI was unnerving. Even now, smoky essence could be detected despite the rumble of air scrubbers. The char marks were visible at the edges of the door to the server room at the end of the corridor. It would be a while before maintenance could erase the damage.

Since there were two suspects to go through, Champion divided his team in two. On a wall screen was a picture of a young girl with blonde hair and on the left was a man with visible tattoos all over his body. Both images were screen captures from security cameras. From this his teams were to go through passport pictures of everyone aboard the ship for probable matches.

On the first pass, it was women for one team and men for the other based on gender of the suspects. The group looking to match pictures of the blonde girl came up empty.

"Start looking at the pictures of the men next,"ordered Champion. "Don't assume what the gender is from the picture. That goes for hair colour and eye colour. It is easy to change those things. Look for things like ears, forehead, jawline or hairline. More difficult to disguise."

His teams continued to compare the passport pictures to the screen captures of the blonde girl and the tattooed man.

Ann Gupta, one of the detail working on a terminal nearby motioned Champion to come over. "I can't be sure with this one, Chief," she began. "Chin is right but nose is off, too far away to make out the eyes."

Champion studied the passport picture of a man with longer black hair, black eyes and strong chin. The man pictured in Aubrey Chase Chen's cabin had short cropped blonde hair and the chin. She was right about the nose.

"It's broken," said Champion.

"What?" asked Gupta."

His nose," replied Champion. "I've had a few myself. In the picture the nose is broken. In the cabin it is fixed."

"So a probable then?"

"Yes, good work," answered Champion, patting her shoulder. "What is his name and where on the ship is he?"

Gupta punched up the data. "It says Petr Goroshenko. He's on Deck 10, cabin 303. Galaxy deck. Do we apprehend?"

No," replied Champion. He pulled up a list of names on his padd and forwarded it to her terminal. "Send a message to the Marshal and these select people and say we have one probable and are now doing constant video surveillance on their possible location. Alert our patrols. Let's not tip off the suspect."

"And once we've done that?" Gupta asked?"Let's not get ahead of ourselves," Champion said."We try to locate the girl as well.""And if she is a stowaway with no passport to match up with?"

"Then let's hope Boz has a new system for us to search, that the Chief is back on the job and that when we apprehend this Goroshenko, he tells us everything about what's been happening on this ship," said Champion. He turned to see all his security people were now focused on him standing over Gupta's terminal. "Alright people, back to work. Find the girl."