Captain Blaze spoke slowly, his artificial voicebox carefully neutral as he presented his documents. "I am afraid that no excuse could cover for my failure, but I have prepared detailed documentation of the situation aboard Holy Light. While the staff were hand-picked by the Reavers to join the crew of Terminus Trading Company, nearly every single member was selected as a double agent for their family or faction.
While each of them is eminently capable on paper, the infighting and clan politics they have brought have made it nearly impossible to function as a unit. After I blocked all communications from the ship to outside locations, I believed that I had the worst of it under control, and the crew was beginning to work together toward becoming a cohesive unit.
The training reports are in there and have shown great improvements over the first few days after their arrival.
For that reason, I thought the double agents were willing to bide their time and wait until the communication barrier was lowered to send their collected data back to their sponsors. Such things are fairly standard for a newly founded Reaver ship, and communicating ship data to outside sources would most commonly only lead to a demotion and a public lashing, so there are always a few willing to risk it for the rewards that they or their family will be given by their sponsors.
In addition to what Klinger and DiFranco found among the crew quarters, I also found a few well-disguised communication logs. They begin on page seven of the documents I have presented."
Most of the first six pages were just standard Reaver family drama, the sort of thing you would never get rid of when families had thousands of years of history with each other. But page seven of the records he presented painted a very different picture.
The transmissions were encrypted with an unknown algorithm, but that was no real hindrance to Nico or the Innu, and they had both cracked it independently within a few seconds.
From the first transmission, it was a big shock.
[Keegith, we have only forty-five days before the voting for Rae 5 Commandant. If we aren't going to let that bitch Mary take total control of the planet, you need to act now. Her pet Trading Company needs to be so thoroughly discredited that she will never recover from it.
Whatever it takes, you need to get it done.]
The message came from the leader of one of the largest Reaver Families, who had always been antagonistic to the Tarith Family, but the response was enough to end his career as the leader of his family.
[Lord Mori, I have the plan well underway. The mutiny can begin the moment that I receive independent confirmation that you have released my children from your custody.]
The man named Keegith was one of the conspirators identified as a possible leader in the other documents, and he had been the one that had created the unauthorized weapons, while Lord Mori was one of the leading contenders for the position of Ambassador for the Reavers among the Trade Alliance.
"It seems that there is much more than a simple mutiny here. Ransoming family members, political corruption, extortion to commit mutiny, the list is rather extensive. What do humans do when there is such a large conspiracy and problem afoot?" The Giant observer asked.
"We will hold a trial here for the members of our Company who are involved. We will also forward the documents and all evidence to the Reaver Council, every Council Member, at once so that they can begin their own investigation and trials.
While the Mori family is powerful, the leader could well be stripped of his rank or executed for attempting to start a mutiny among another Company. The Reavers count it much like declaring open war on another Family if you are caught in this level of corruption, and like the Alliance, the Reavers don't take that lightly." Max explained.
"The question remains, what convinced the others to go along with such an insane plan? Most of them don't have any connection to the Mori Family, and some don't even have a particular connection to the Blaze Family." Klinger asked.
"That's what the trial is for. Right now, we are only examining evidence to determine if it's real and admissible." Max shrugged.
He nodded at Nico, who sent all of the documents they had collected so far to the Reaver Company Commanders gathered around Rae 5 and returned a dozen messages an instant later.
"We have more evidence. It seems that Lord Mori wasn't as stealthy as he thought, and the other Companies have been watching him." Nico explained and put all of the new data into the data storage of the meeting table for everyone to pull up as they wished.
It detailed a power mad Company Commander who thought he alone deserved to be the Emperor of Mankind and his efforts to undermine the Trade Alliance and put himself into a position where he would have complete control of the assembled forces of humanity.
"Wow, that is a lot of evidence against him. No fewer than fifteen different major Reaver Families have found him guilty of attempting to cause mutinies or assassinate their leaders. Make that sixteen if his involvement here is found to be true.
It doesn't change the guilt of the patsies that he hired or the ones who willingly went along with the attempt to start a mutiny, though. In fact, we should thank him in a way. We wouldn't know that so many traitors are in our midst without his hard work.
We should see how Divine Tribulation is doing under Luke Tarith. If the Mori Family is going after the Tarith Family, there might be a major incident there." DiFranco suggested.
"Luke Tarith is a bit more ruthless than Marcus Blaze is. I've seen multiple reports of severe punishments under his command, so I believe that they tried the same there but might not have gotten far enough to call it a proper conspiracy. We will pull up all the data we can, and I will order the Second Battalion to flip bunks and confiscate any and all contraband they find right now." Max decided.
If he was going to clean up the Company, it was best not to give anyone the time to react.
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