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Moon Song
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Technically, if he's using titles, he should have called you "Dr. Hoff", but you don't care and neither does he. Still would have been nice to say something like "Technically Dr. Hoff but call me what you like", just to assert a little respect.
Speaking of respect, I think you shouldn't put your contacts on. All else aside, it's a question of setting a precedent of behavior. Vanski is not your boss. You are an assistant to a contractor that he has (presumably, somehow) hired, and though this puts you at a lower rank than him, your ranks are not within the same hierarchy and he does not have direct authority over you. You are doing him, or someone leaning on him, a service - one for which you have already been put to significant inconvenience, for dubious reward. Frankly, just being barely polite to him is somewhat more than he might expect, from an objective viewpoint. You should show respect to him, since you are working on his property and presumably someone somewhere in the chain above you is being compensated somehow (and because he employs big people with big guns), but it's not proper for him to give you orders; theoretically, you don't take orders from anyone except Arza. He knows this, which is why he's making a request. If it was a request related to your job, or directly related to the investigation of the killings, you'd really need to acquiesce, but it's not. He's basically acting you to talk and behave in a certain way, which is not really in the range of what he can reasonably expect you to just say yes to. It's like if a detective interrogating a witness to a crime asked them to sit up straight and tuck their shirt in. It's not relevant to expectations. But, if you did do it, it would set a precedent of obedience. You might come off as a little rude now if you refuse, but if Vanski develops an expectation of you being obedient then any future refusals by you will offend him far more. So I think you should politely decline.
It seems likely that Arza is actually being threatened to comply with things and be helpful, but it's entirely plausible that the innocent young graduate Penn Hoff wouldn't know her mentor's full situation. If you don't know it, the same threat can't be used against you (at least not for minor things), because in order to do so the person doing the threatening would have to tell you all about it, and these people all play their cards close to the chest by habit.
As for the deaths - I lean towards Raush being unlucky, not the deliberate target. Several reasons:
1) Place of death. Raush has been here a long time and should have relatively high freedom of movement. Why kill him right outside a place with a ton of security features, and in front of a guard, when you could kill him somewhere more convenient?
2) Method of death. He was shot. You don't need a gun to kill a nerd like Raush. Anyone who premeditated his death could have easily arranged for him to be strangled, bludgeoned or poisoned. A gun could have attracted attention - this place is literally covered in sensors that could pick up the shot, even if it was some sort of energy weapon.
3) The guard. Guards are specifically trained and equipped both to protect other people from being killed and to not be killed themselves. If your target isn't the guard themselves, then you don't want to have a guard anywhere nearby when you're aiming to kill someone. Again, why not wait for Raush to move further away, or otherwise make sure the guard isn't a threat?
4) The door. Someone made sure the door was open for Penn to come out, if she had decided to. Anyone capable of hacking the door would have known enough to only do so if they knew the guard wasn't able to open the door. The guard opened the door for Raush, so the guard was there when he left, and the position of the crime scene suggests they were probably killed then, before Raush managed to get any further away. Raush and the guard were killed together, and THEN someone made sure the door was open. Unless there was a third party just taking advantage of the situation, which seems unlikely, then whoever killed Raush didn't want to ONLY kill Raush.
5) Time of death. Again, Raush has been here a long time. If someone just wanted to kill him, why not do it before now?
If someone was being targeted, in all likelihood, it was Arza. He was supposed to have been in there with Penn and Raush, by that time, so someone without access to the security footage could easily have assumed he would be - and that he'd have enough business with people in the rest of this place that he'd have to leave again relatively soon. He's older and has more history and is more likely to have caused someone to have a reason to want to kill him. Penn is less threatening and more valuable alive.
It's also possible that someone was just trying to get into the room, and the occupants were irrelevant. They killed the guard to secure the entrance, Raush because he was a witness, and then tried to get in. They succeeded only in hacking the inner door and were forced to give up and leave.
If we rule out a random hacker taking advantage of the guard's death to unlock the room, and that someone capable of killing the guard could have happened to also have the skills and equipment to hack the door, then we can assume the whole thing was premeditated. But, not premeditated far enough in advance or by someone with sufficient resources to have been able to have made things easy on themselves by avoiding things that would have made things more difficult. It suggests multiple people, at least. It's possible the guard was on the hacker's side, and was betrayed afterwards leaving only the hacker, but if that was the case the guard would have been warned Raush was coming out and would have been able to hold things off until he left. Unless Raush forgot something and came back unexpectedly? With more information like exact time, how the guard died, position of the bodies and so on, we could say more.
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