"I think there's something they're not telling us," Cassandra muttered through the radio as she was taking Kanya for a practice run through space. The MV2904 still had to stop temporarily to resupply, so she had decided to take Kanya for a practice run. "Like what?" Kanya replied.
"I don't know, maybe they put something on our ship before the last stop or something."
"What was our last stop?"
"Oh right, you don't remember. Anyway, it's all a little mysterious. What could possibly be so important that even the Aegis engineering team would be looking around our ship?"
"But they were just nearby. It's possible they just thought of helping out."
"It's obvious the last pause in our journey was due to sabotage. They didn't mention the pirates I saw on the long range sensors in the announcement. They just mentioned a security concern."
Kanya was silent. He already guessed correctly about the 'security concern'.
"Apparently among the engineers in the team is a expert pilot. I asked her if she would join us, and she said she had to attend to more 'pressing matters'."
"So they're not ordinary engineers?"
"Chances are they're all heads of some kind of engineering department on the Aegis. They pounce on 'away' missions whenever they come along. All of them are supposed to be pretty well versed in combat."
"Even the young girl?"
"That 'young girl' is the expert pilot. She's supposedly a prodigy of some kind when it came to anything. A lot of people on the Meganet say that she might as well be the 30th Gifted. Of course, she's a mystery of her own. All her files are classified, even to most of the Admirals in the Terran fleet. Some databases even deny her existence. Then again, it's probably some bug concerning her age. She's supposedly still below the age of majority, which would make the secrecy around her files sensible. A child in the military is extremely rare."
***
In a makeshift interrogation room on the ship, the supposed culprit was caught. He was being interrogated, for obvious reasons. Behind the scenes, Pandora was watching.
Within several seconds, she drew a conclusion. "It's obvious he's not the one behind all this. He's just the scapegoat."
"A very well prepared one at that. Even a memory scan didn't yield anything."
"This is pointless. Send him back to his holding cell. We'll drop him off at Nakamura and have him rehabilitated."
Having said that, she leaves the room and heads for the MV2904 hangar. She had an appointment to keep.