Chapter 30

A grim-faced SD Taylor met us at the lift when we got out.

“This way,” she said with little warmth in her voice. She had a sour expression on her middle-aged and plain face. I had also noticed she was a bit dumpy for her medium height. Obviously, she didn’t work out in the high-gee gyms as we were supposed to.

We were ushered into a large briefing room. It appeared that the full contingency of twelve detectives, plus our boss, was assembled with the Colonel and LTC Rodriguez. Effectively we were two teams, Darla ran our team, and a bloke call Warana ran the other.

I was surprised when my medallion warmed, and I met the pale bloodshot, pale blue eyes of Major Simon Schneider. I was amused to find that I had a good 20cm on him. He had also let himself go a bit, and the obvious paunch, the fleshy, ruddy cheeks and the balding head weren’t flattering on a man in his early forties.

We received barely hidden and hostile looks, from the two, average looking, solidly built, dark-haired and pale-skinned men who were the other detectives in our team. They were introduced to us as Hendrik Geier and Nikolai Popov. The third member, a tall, slim man called Oliver Le Blanc, had a downtrodden aura and he seemed disinterested in the whole show.

Sarah had told us that the two people we had replaced had not had their contracts renewed by their countries and the two positions had been vacant for several months. She had taken Ray’s slot. Warana, her boss, had been trying to sort out the mess left by his predecessor and had only been in charge of their team for two months.

I noted the separation between the two teams. Lucky us, it wasn’t hard to work out whose team we had ended up in. I soon worked out that Nikolai tended to be Darla’s partner, and Oliver was Hendrik’s. Not that it seemed to please either man, and Oliver seemed to be sitting in his own zone.

The Colonel conducted the briefing. From what we could ascertain, the three perps were dead. However, somehow, someone had gotten a grenade-launcher onto Luna. The ship that had been fired upon was an Arabian owned transport.

The company that operated the transport had sent over a passenger list, and we had information about where it had left from, the route, the crew and the cargo manifest. We had to work out why the antagonists had picked this particular ship to blow up.

Was it just a terrorist action and this was a convenient target, or was it personal, or did the perpetrator have some other agenda and the crew and passengers were just the sacrifices? Was the door being blocked open deliberate or accidental?

Since Justin and I had forensic training, we were on evidence collection with Oliver and two other techs from the lab. They were both Sergeants, but not classed as MP’s. The rest of our team were going to interview the people who had survived and collect any video evidence available.

Warana’s team was going to start collecting whatever information they could about the people concerned as the rest of the names came in and try to determine whether they were involved or not.

They had a video of the three perps, thanks to the MPs stationed at the dome, and they were going to try to identify them. They would also check out the validity of what information they had been supplied.

Darla and Schneider had both complained and said one of them should be with us, but the Colonel over-ruled them. Darla, Nicolai and Hendrik knew about the people who should and shouldn’t have been there. Schneider was needed to coordinate between them, the Arabian officials and Warana’s team as new information came to light.

We had our assignments, so we split up.

Oliver sighed and told us to come with him.

He took us to a storeroom and pulled out three trunks that were on their own trolleys. He pointed to boxes of protective gloves and then to different sized and types of evidence bags. He told us to load a heap of them in the trunks. He offered to get the camcorders and left us to it.

James and I investigated what else was in the storeroom and found bags of differently sized tongs, tweezers and small flat-nosed scoops, and we tossed them in. I found a couple of boxes of little-coloured markers that had millimetre markings on them and numbers, so I threw them in as well.

I found several old-fashioned chalk slates that we could write on and to put near an item before we took a picture. Ink type markers don’t work well on Luna outside the domes. We included several long tape measures and some spare rulers.

James and I looked at the camcorders Oliver offered and passed them back to him. We had our own and considered them much better. We did take the sealed and marked data storage chips and dropped them in our forensic backpacks.

Oliver was impressed when he looked at our packs and said, “Great, I’ll just be your gopher as you guys seem to have better gear than I have.”