With such a heavy accusation hanging in the air, the Envoys had no qualms about Max cancelling his participation in the day's planned events and assigning someone else to take over in his place.
The tour of the Academy was to be done by Headmistress Medusa herself, with the assistance of a few of her office staff. Meanwhile, the tours of the ship were guided by the Illithid, who was more than capable of sensing everything that happened aboard Terminus, so he wouldn't be missing out on anything, even if he weren't physically present.
Max and Nico sat side by side at a small round table, accompanied by Colonel Klinger, who had reported the incident, as well as a group of legal experts sent by the Reavers and the Giant Envoy, who requested to be present as a monitor, in the name of impartial justice.
Having an unrelated judge and jury during incidents aboard a ship wasn't always feasible, but an outside monitor was how the Alliance helped ensure impartiality during the hearings.
"Alright, Klinger, tell me how this all started. From the very beginning of what alerted you that there might be something amiss among the crew." Max ordered.
"I was doing the weekly Battalion inventory review, and I had selected the munitions stores, the bedding stocks and the raw ore piles for manual verification. Bedding stocks came back normal, but raw ore came up nearly a tonne short of the reported usage, so I requested DiFranco from the Fourth Battalion to double-check my work and usage charts, as per regulations.
It was during his check that we discovered that the missing material had been transferred to the Holy Light under Marcus Blaze, so we moved our search there, under the excuse of being a performance review committee, and found a great deal of resentment that he had been picked over others who had joined at the same time and had more prestigious families back home.
Once that was established, it wasn't hard to convince them to admit what had taken place and to find the weapons that they had made, and then attempted to erase the logs from the Materials Printers.
I have here documents that we collected during our investigation, and they name seventeen crew members of the Cruiser Holy Light, along with four staff members aboard Terminus, outlining a plan to overthrow the ship and go independent the first time they were sent on a mission outside of the weapons range of Terminus and her Mecha Battalions.
Among them are all four of the Company Commanders sent from Rae 5, but not the chosen Battalion Commander, who appears to remain loyal to Captain Blaze and the Terminus Trading Company."
The room went silent as Max and the others looked over the documents that had been collected, verifying their last dates of modification and the users whose biometrics had been logged into them, and then had Nico and one of the Innu Tech Nomads verify that they were not tampered with to implicate an uninvolved party before the contents were read.
The device was intended to self-destruct when an unauthorized party touched it. But unfortunately for them, they didn't have the ability to override Colonel Klinger's authority, and he had been the first and only one to physically touch the data tablet.
The evidence inside was fairly damning, as it outlined the basics of their plan and was intended to serve as an override during the mutiny by falsely reporting certain members' locations and status. That alone wasn't enough for a conviction, but this was only the first piece of collected evidence. There was a long list of other data, including who made the unauthorized weapons, who accessed the room they were stored in after they were created, and how they were related before arriving at the Terminus Trading Company. They even went into what sort of status their family held within the Reavers.
The next part of the evidence check, after the first batch had been deemed admissible, was the interrogation of the prisoners by the two senior officers. Most of them predictable denied all knowledge since the Pilots wouldn't physically rough them up at that point in the interrogation, but a few believed that they had not committed a crime. With cause, a mutiny against a criminal or incompetent commander who had clearly violated the Reaver Code was justifiable. It wouldn't lead to the mutineers' expulsion or any sort of charges against them.
For example, if the Commander had deliberately betrayed the Reavers, it could be deemed justifiable to overthrow them, and it seemed that was the defence that they were going with in this case.
Their argument was that by going with what they viewed as an unqualified Captain from a lesser Reaver family and by fraternizing with the Alliance members, who were not officially members of their Trade Group, and only had the most basic of agreements with the Reavers, that Max had betrayed them, the Reavers and the Commander's oath of loyalty and protection.
It was a very long shot of an argument, but they would be allowed to present evidence of it at the trial once it started, assuming that they had any.
Of course, since the ship had never actually gone anywhere, taken any casualties, or even issued an order beyond the basic daily routine, it would be a very big stretch to justify their mutiny against their Captain, but they would be allowed to.
Captain Marcus Blaze of the Holy Light was the next one to present evidence. The Captain looked a little sheepish as he bowed politely to Max and with good cause.
He had failed to notice a mutiny beginning on his ship, which was his first Command, and before he had ever even been on a single mission. It wasn't exactly a glowing review of his capabilities as Captain, but he had prepared a number of documents for Max to read.
"Alright, Captain Blaze, you are free to start your presentation. Hopefully, you have a very good explanation for what exactly is going on aboard your ship." Nico greeted him as he sat across the round table from the group reviewing his evidence.
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