The medical evacuations were quick. Domestic and foreign terrorists like to use an initial bomb to injury people, then when medical personnel arrives, they detonate another bomb or commence an attack to create an even deadlier secondary attack. As a result, the way paramedics responded to bombings is known as “load and go”, where they round up as many wounded as possible and get them to a triage area at least a thousand feet away from ground zero with additional security in place.
Police officers then conduct a search for the security and safety of the scene, including marking any items that could be hazardous. Amongst other hazards, there were potential blood borne pathogens, metal and glass debris, potentially collapsable structures, downed electrical wires, hazardous materials, and secondary explosive devices. With fires ongoing, they set up cofferdams around storm drains so evidence wouldn’t be washed away. Mark told the fire department not to overdo watering down fires, even though he knew they would probably ignore him and do their job the way they normally did.
Then they look for witnesses, attempt to preserve any transient evidence, and document the scene. Once the perimeter was secured, all essential personnel put on personal protective equipment, (PPE), which included Tyvek coveralls, leather and rubber gloves, metal shank boots, and respiratory and eye protection. Unfortunately, not everyone had the necessary gear, so Mark put those people on gathering witness statements.
Once all of the dead and wounded were removed from the area, hazards were documented, and personnel in the area equipped proper protective gear, the investigation began.
Forensic work is mostly boring work, consisting of meticulous and close attention to details. It consists largely of finding debris, cataloguing it, marking distances and locations, gathering lots of witness statements, most of which come from people who do not want to talk to the police. The core tenant of forensic investigation hadn’t changed in three hundred years:
“Wherever he steps, whatever he touches, whatever he leaves, even unconsciously, will serve as a silent witness against him. Not only his fingerprints or his footprints, but his hair, the fibers from his clothes, the glass he breaks, the tool mark he leaves, the paint he scratches, the blood or semen he deposits or collects.”
All investigations then proceeded to the next step, establishing the placement of a suspect at the scene of a crime. Every object at a crime scene needs to be placed within some point of contact or transference to an individual.
There’s a few problems that law enforcement has to deal with in order to make this work. The scene must be quarantined from contamination, even from the officers themselves. Then there must be an adequate facility to properly process all of the collected data. If a crime lab is inadequate to the research needed, then the evidence gets tagged and tracked to another location, ensuring the evidence maintains a strict seal of custody at every step along the way. If the evidence becomes unaccounted for at any step of the process, it becomes unusable.
Prior to bagging any piece of evidence, video and photographic evidence must be taken to properly reconstruct the crime scene before altering it in any way. Mark set up a hasty evidence collection command post to perform all the data cataloguing and evidence collection, as well as set up chains of custody over evidence. He also needed to create a log of all personnel who entered and exited the scene, how long they were there, why they were there, and what time they entered and left the area.
Unfortunately, the police staff of Gebo were woefully unprepared, as was his entire staff. The police dealt with big city crimes, but their training was crude and rudimentary. The military staff dealt with combat, not forensic investigations. This meant Mark was the only one capable of doing the investigation. Even Luciana had trained as a combat pilot, not as an investigator. For the first time in his life, Mark missed the humandroids that could perform these sorts of mindless, manual labor with great ease. As it was, he could only use them to set up an outer perimeter and mark entry and exit paths so evidence didn’t get trampled.
The other problem Mark ruminated over was the facility he’d do the investigation at. Not only was he certain that the forensic lab wouldn’t be up to his standards, but he also didn’t know if he could trust the local police. Whether there were police on the take or whether they would destroy evidence out of ignorance, he didn’t want to leave the investigation in their hands. However, if he didn’t include them at all, their bitterness could lead to a major lawless problem. If you ticked off the local police, the way they got retribution was by not policing areas, only responding to calls, which lead to an increase in crime and a hostility to the political administration. He was so done with the bureaucratic nonsense, but it seemed fate was telling him that this was going to be his life from here on out, at least until the Colonel recovered.
He decided the best course of action was to use the Colonel’s ship as the main investigation point. He’d select from the most capable police officers and have them under a restricted parolee status as investigative aids and as training for investigating any future attacks.
A common mistake people make is to assume that when a blast goes off, all of the evidence is destroyed. This isn’t true. 90% of the container evidence is recoverable. Even portions of the explosive could be found if the bomber was a novice. Bombs require pressure to form, and amateur bombs tend to use cheap materials for casing, weak metals and plastic. The professional term for a bomb that didn’t fully detonate is a “low-order explosive”.
The downside of recovery is that the container is not in its original shape or form and can be scattered for thousands of feet away from the initial blast. Searching thousands of square feet for tiny fragments is a long, boring, and tedious process. He was at least lucky that no inclement weather was going to destroy the evidence.
Luciana walked next to them as they moved forward, photographing and documenting each piece of evidence before they collected it. They would be out here for several hours. He had some of the cops who were on scene wrap up the remnants of the van in plastic sheets, load it up onto a carrier vehicle coated with new tarpaulins, and send it off to be processed. The van would be a major part of the investigation, so he needed it in a place he could fully comb over it.
“So, what do we know so far?” Luciana asked him.
“Well, what we know is precious little. The first part we know is that this was not a military bomb. The smoke was white. White smoke indicates high levels of air in the mixture, black smoke from explosives like c4 are from high levels of explosives.
The second thing we know is that they did use a high explosive, since the blast sent out a shock wave and detonated faster than the speed of sound. You can also see the brisance from the all broken glass. So it’s someone who has connections somewhere.
The third thing we know is that this was an amateur hour attack. There’s two things you can do to make an explosion more deadly. The first is to confine the blast radius so it goes in one direction. An omnidirectional blast loses force far more than a directed charge. Using a van as a delivery mechanism might put a damper on directing a charge.
But the real clincher is that they didn’t pack their explosives with extra ballistic material. They depended on the explosion alone to do the job instead of adding additional pieces to increase the casualty rate. If this were my mission, I’d have detonated and had a team on standby. While everyone was disoriented, I’d have brought in the cleanup crew to shoot everyone and verify that the target had been eliminated.”
“That’s the problem,” Luciana said, “Who was the target? You, me, the incoming Colonel, the civilian government, all of us? Establishing a motive is going to be difficult if we don’t know who the target was.”
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“Let’s hold off on that,” Mark replied, “For now, we just need to work the scene and reconstruct what happened, then we’ll find out who did this and bring them to justice.”
Once they finished processing the initial blast area, they got the police to start walking slowly through the area and pick up every piece of metal they could find. If they found something, they would raise their hand, the police photographer would run over, take a picture of the location, then the officer would collect it. Mark also collected air samples, swabbed for chemical residue using disposable forceps, then labeled the swab and documented where it was taken, changed gloves and then swabbed for non-tainted areas to have a control sample to compare against, and vacuumed up dust from the area, which could contain traces of explosive material and help with identification. It was slow, monotonous work.
After ten hours, they had patrolled the area carefully enough that Mark felt confident the scene was as well processed as it could be. Coordinating such a large area in a populous region is nearly impossible for any prolonged time period.
They removed the police quarantine around the area and let people continue moving and working around the areas that hadn’t been affected by the blast. They took all of the evidence to a special holding area in the Colonel’s space ship. He’d have to look into what facilities the locals had, what equipment he could get from civilian labs, and what he could beg, borrow, or steal from the traders.
As he and Luciana went back onto Mark’s ship, Mark pulled Luciana into the Captain’s room.
“Hey, we need to talk,” he began.
“About what?”
“I’m going to need you to take over the other investigation. I have one lead that I’ve been playing close to the chest. EVE is an advanced artificial intelligence. I had her reconstruct the jump point for the ex-police chief’s ship. Then I had her follow everyone who jumped from this planet to another solar system, and checked it against the logs. From that, she believes that she can track wormhole jumps with high precision and knows where the ex-chief took off too.”
This was all half-true, as were many of the stories he told Luciana. In actuality, tracking warp hole jumps was not a science, you couldn’t precisely track where someone would jump from the math alone. What you ended up with were varying percentages of certainty about where the coordinates went. AIs didn’t have this type of intuitive grasp for filtering out signal vs. noise.
Instead, after EVE ran her calculations, that information was sent to his brain in a jar, “Mr. Headley” as he liked to think of him, who did his own calculations and non-literal “gut” instinct. It was surprisingly effective, at an 80% probability.
“I’ll get Colonel Grohall to authorize a new vehicle for the mission. It will probably be less equipped than what we’re used to, but we can’t risk using one of our current vessels because they may have researched us. We can’t risk the operation on them immediately recognizing us.” She agreed. She sat on his bed.
“Jesus, we’re getting shot at, blown up, involved in space battles. I couldn’t eat a salad because my hand was shaking so hard,” she said. He sat beside her and gave her a side hug while she rested her head on his shoulder. “Think it will go back to normal?” she asked.
Mark thought about it. “I don’t know,” he finally replied. “There’s just too many variables. All over the universe, there’s been pirating raids. If this becomes a prolonged war, then this might be the new normal.”
They sat there together for a while, resting on each other. Mark gave her a mild shake and said, “Come on, let’s plan on having a going away party for whichever crew members you want. Once I get confirmation on the ship, we can split up teams appropriately.”
She smiled at him. “I’d like that,” she responded, as she squeezed him back. They got up and Luciana left. After she left, Mark flopped back on his bed and put his hands to his forehead. What a mess he was in. He wasn’t any closer to the NVA seed, or finding out what was going on, and he’d be stuck managing the planet while Luciana was off finding out… well, whatever was waiting wherever the other ship had jumped off to.
He took two minutes to throw himself a pity party, then got up and went back to work. He had a terrorist attack to dig into and a city-state to rebuild. He couldn’t afford to waste time. His first priority was putting in a call to Col. Grohall. He needed to sneak in a different ship and get the crew on there.
He sent out an encrypted message for the Colonel, explaining what he needed, the current state of the investigation, and Colonel Rola’s condition. If all went well, they should be able to get a new ship within a week.
He then pulled out his data pad and began making notes from the blast site. Professional photographers could now photograph a scene and make it into a full 3d digitized space, allowing an investigator to literally step back into the scene. It was also pretty snazzy at trials, allowing prosecutors the ability to literally walk the jury through what they thought happened. Each scene was signed by a digital encryption key to prevent tampering.
You could take photographs and video with less fancy equipment, but they typically didn’t encode the 3d data necessary to do a full walkthrough reconstruction. If you had the time and money, you could take measurements from the scene itself or from satellite photos and then encode 3d data into the photographs after the fact, but the time and money to do so usually meant that most investigators just used a professional photographer with the correct rig to handle the big work.
As Mark stepped back into the scene, he began looking over the scene. The blast pressure from the explosion sent shock waves that were reflected up into the air and down the streets, causing structural damage and glass debris everywhere. It was a seated explosion with one clear epicenter of the blast, near the van that he had spotted. He contacted EVE and told her to reconstruct the possible blast paths and where fragments might still be that the team hadn’t discovered.
He then went through the voice recordings, eyewitness testimony, and police sketches looking for any clue as to who left the van out in the open. The most important pieces were the recovered vehicle parts, even though they hadn’t been processed yet. All vehicles had a Vehicle Identification Number, but most also had an additional Confidential Vehicle Identification Number, or CVIN, that was used to track down chop shops or the public VIN plate on the dashboard has been removed and replaced with a counterfeit.
Mark thought he did a decent job during the crisis, but afterwards, he had some doubts about his performance. Had they verified that everyone on the scene was who they claimed? It was easy enough to get fake police and medical outfits, and even ID could be easily forged, so they needed to vet that everyone had proper identification that passed all tests besides physical inspection.
He had screwed up one other area as well. Using thermal equipment after a blast can help quickly identify components used in the blast, they would be far hotter than pieces not used in the blast. This was especially useful in identifying fragments embedded in walls, ceilings, and other hard to see areas.
He’d need to set up a procedure to make sure that no lapses in judgement happened again. What else had he messed up? There was a criminal joke that went, “Every criminal commits ten mistakes when they commit a crime. A genius can remember eight of them.” Most criminals were not geniuses, hence, they ended up getting caught.
He felt that he was in the same boat. He hadn’t gotten a warrant to search the nearby buildings for fragments and paraphernalia related to the bombing. As the place was under martial law, he didn’t need to get a warrant to do anything. But appearances matter, and not doing things the correct way would cause resentment down the line. He needed to be careful.
He also should have had his men go up in a chopper and document the scene from an aerial perspective. It might have been a bust, but it could showcase clues that a ground perspective couldn’t. At worst, it couldn’t have hurt anything.
He filed all these thoughts away for his after-action report, where he’d come up with a systematic approach for police operations. For now, he’d need to commandeer the medical crew of Col. Rosa’s ship and get them doing the forensic work: looking at tool marks, checking tire and foot impressions, fingerprints lifted from the van and explosive casings, and analyzing trace evidence.
He also needed to write up the narrative description report, which summarized all of the findings to date. Normally, he logged out of the game to get his training, but he was so exhausted from the days events that he simply passed out on his bed.