Amy and Marissa followed the three officers into one of the conference rooms, while Beth and Ariana went into another room with three other officers.

"Please be seated, ladies," one of the men said, and Amy and Marissa sat down across from them. They proceeded with swearing in. "I'm Lieutenant Forrester, to my right is Lt. Fisk, and to my left is Lt. Sirtis. Miss Cromwell, what is your level of comm access?" Amy looked at Marissa, who nodded to her. "I have level two access to local comms, and level four access to FTL's," Amy replied.

"Yes, and I see that your access code was used for a level one protocol on the FTL line in the yacht club's comm panel, two days before the Nebula Cup race. So how did you gain level one access for that message?"

Amy trembled slightly, but Marissa nodded at her to answer. "We obtained an access upgrade through an off-world proxy…I don't know who it was…they had an advance copy of the course, and let us look at it."

"So you cheated," Lt. Sirtis sneered.

"We didn't cheat!" Amy cried. "We thought the course was too easy…we thought it would be boring to everyone…we never gave out the copy of the course to anyone on our team."

"So what DID you do with the information?" Lt. Fisk chimed in.

"We mucked around with the location of the checkpoints, that's all! And then we uploaded it."

"Uploaded it?" Lt. Forrester looked at her with disbelief. "Uploaded it where? Exactly to what destination?"

"Directly to the Nebula Cup server on Calmwind," Amy admitted.

"Impossible!" exclaimed Lt. Sirtis. "The Nebula Cup server is licensed by the Stellar Military. It'd take a whole lot more than a level one FTL access to upload anything to its production database!"

"We sort of hacked into it…" Amy squirmed in her chair. "The ones who gave us the course also gave us some codes to get in via a backdoor…and our friend is really good at hacking into those kinds of vulnerabilities…but we didn't mean any harm!"

Lt. Forrester cleared his throat. "And your friend who hacked in was who? Name!"

"Lynn….Lynn Lambretta…" Amy said softly. "But she's just a first year! She didn't even really know what she was doing, or changing! We told her what to do, and she just did what we told her!"

Marissa chimed in. "My client had no intention of causing anyone any harm. This was akin to a prank, and obviously there were outsiders who wanted to disrupt the Nebula Cup, and they just took advantage of some innocent schoolgirls."

"And you have no idea who these outsiders were?" Forrester pressed.

"None," Amy insisted.

"How did you contact them?" Fisk demanded.

"They sort of contacted us…" Amy squirmed deeper in her seat. "They contacted Beth."

"Any idea why they contacted her in particular?" Forrester knew that Beth's father, Laurent Devereaux, did business within Orion. And most of it was not above board.

"I really don't," Amy responded.

Forrester sighed. "All right, Miss Cromwell, that's enough for now. We're going to be digging very deeply into those comm logs. If there's anything more you want to tell us, now's the time."

Amy shook her head. Marissa stood, and pulled Amy up by the hand. "Gentlemen," she said respectfully, and pulled Amy along with her out the door.

Meanwhile, Beth and Ariana were seated across from three female officers. All of the investigators were cross-feeding their transcripts to each other, so all were able to modify their inquiries as needed.

"Miss Devereaux, is it true that you and Miss Cromwell urged an underclassman, er, ah…Lynn Lambretta, to hack the Nebula Cup database?" Lt. Vargas demanded.

"We told her that the course that we received would be uninteresting, and Lynn was willing to move the check points around. And she was able to hack into the Nebula Cup database and replace the course with the modified one. To Lynn, it seemed like it was just a prank…I'm sure she had no intention of things happening the way they did."

Vargas scowled. "And this? Was this a prank, too?" The woman to the right of Lt. Vargas put up a hologram of the sabotaged output shaft of Jenny's dinghy.

Beth feigned disbelief. "This is one of the control output shafts! Was this on one of our dinghies? Did it break after the crash?"

"Miss Devereaux, you signed off on both canarderons on VK207, after you were disqualified for the race. Can you explain these grinding marks?" Vargas seemed to do most of the talking. The other two women just took notes or put up displays.

"My port side canarderon kept binding below center," Beth offered. "I pulled the inspection ring off the outer pressure hull and ground the shaft so that it would move more freely. I didn't think I cut into it that much…maybe the outer pressure pinch seal got distorted when I put the ring back on and it dug into the shaft after launch, but in the atmosphere it moved a lot more freely. The torque curve was back in spec. I don't know what you're trying to imply, but I wanted Jenny to win for our team. It didn't matter that she bumped me! I wanted our team to win!"

Ariana butted in. "The dinghy made seven landings from the relay station to Tau after this maintenance sign off," she noted, looking at the flight logs relative to the maintenance log. "I seriously doubt that this was intentional. Did your team examine the pinch seal?"

Vargas huffed. "The canarderon and everything attached to it, including the seal, was lost in mid air. Probably landed in the lake."

"My client explained, quite reasonably, why these marks were here. I'm sure your engineers must have considered a distorted seal as a possible, perhaps even probable cause of this fatigue. Do we need to beat this dead horse any more, or can we move on?"

Vargas considered for a moment. "Fine," she said at last. "Miss Devereaux, our information indicates that you specifically were contacted, and that you were given the advanced race details…why do you suppose they contacted you?"

Ariana butted in again. "Objection. Calls for speculation."

"Right," Vargas hissed. "Let me rephrase. Your father seems to engage in a lot of business in the Orion sector…the people who contacted you tried to make the comm logs show a link to the Cepheus Dark Bay, but in fact, the signal came directly from an unknown ship, holding station above the Flame Nebula, in Orion. Was it your father who contacted you? Or one of his associates?"

"I told you I have no idea who they were. A lot of people do business in Orion! It's not a crime!"

Ariana moved to shush her, but Beth was piqued. "I'm sick of people looking down on my dad! He's an honest man making an honest living in a place a lot of people are too chicken-shit to go!"

"That's enough!" Ariana pinched Beth's thigh, making her wince with pain. "And that's enough questions about who these outsiders were. My client says she doesn't know, and that's that. Asked and answered. Are we done here?"

"We're done. For now….but make no mistake. We haven't finished scouring the comm logs." Vargas glowered.

Ariana smiled sweetly back at her as she rose to go, pulling Beth with her. "Scour away! Don't miss any spots!"

They walked out and saw Amy and Marissa at the base of the stairs, and promptly joined them. Ariana turned to Colonel Mays. "Colonel, I suggest that you have your men get all the listening devices out of my client's room, before I have them pulled and examined by a Galactic Empire advocacy court. It is a constitutional violation to listen in on anyone who has retained counsel, and we had been retained before your crew showed up on Tau."

Mays offered a relenting smile. "Fine, Miss Villanueva. My team will go over and retrieve them, but the timing of your retention relative to the placing of the devices is splitting hairs. We were well within constitutional boundaries."

Ariana glared back at his fake smile. "You have an hour. After that, I take it up with the Galactic Empire's Judge Advocate General. And I kept a few of your little toys for evidence." She and the others strode off, heading for the Lamp House.