2011-03-14 - Cutscene: A Bomb on the Argama

 ON THE ARGAMA :

It's late in the evening on the Argama, a short time after the arrival of one who could argueably just be an enemy in amnesiac's clothing. Thus far, those assigned to watch the woman known as 'Lin' haven't reported anything too unusual, other than the continued tremmors in her hands. They've decided not to let her near the kitchen for now, not only because of the danger of putting a possible enemy in proximity to knives, but the chance she might end up cutting herself. Even so, the young woman has been quiet, not questioning anything her 'keepers' have asked her to do. That is, until now. "Chief Astonaige to bridge." A voice beeps over the radio. "Captain, I think there's something you should come take a look at." The chief is standing near an open control pannel. There are two techs and a ballistics officer huddled around the opening, as a small device gets removed from a casing carefully hidden on the back of the panel. "It's one of ours." The ballistics officer mutters, "It's rigged to a subspace detonator signal. We'll need to analyze it." The other two techs nod, although don't seem all that interested in being too close to an armed explosive. "Wait, what's this?" Attention gets drawn to a piece of folded paper left crammed into the open space left by the exposed panel. "Sir?" The tech looks momentarily confused, and then hands the piece of paper over. The words are written in scrawled lettering.

KATZ WAS HERE. I WANT TO BE THE HERO. "The strangest thing is who tipped us off. We've had cameras or crew watching her at all times, so we were able to catch this. Chief Astonaige steps over to one Bright Noa, showing a grainy image from one of the hallway cameras.

 VIDEO : The image, complete with rolling timestamp, shows the white-haired prisoner walking along with a basket full of laundry, following behind one of the officers assigned to her. It seems for a moment that both would walk right out of the range of the camera without event, but then Lin stops, looking with confusion at the panel on the wall. "Come on, get moving." The officer instructs her, not unkindly. "Um." Lin, now, hesitating as she looks from the wall to the officer and back again. "You should have your people look at that. It's been tampered with. I'm sure of it." The officer, obviously thinking this is some sort of joke just laughs. "Sure sure, come on now. You've got work to do, and clothes don't fold themselves." The camera shows one more brief shot of Lin looking back at the wall panel with confusion before she follows the officer off-screen.

 BACK IN THE HALLWAY : Speaking in a lower tone of voice, the chief seems just a bit concerned. "We've got logistics teams going through inventory to figure out when this explosive went missing. It's been months since this panel has been scheduled for maintenance." He hesitates, and then clears his throat. "But we do have a recording of the last known access to it." Queue a second, far shorter video, showing one Katz Kobayashi affixing the panel into place, with a date stamp back almost four months ago. Between the fact that the prisoner is under constant survailance, the clear evidence to the contrary - it seems quite unlikely that she is directly involved, but still - how did she know it was there? And worse - what will become of one Katz Kobayashi due to these findings?