Rhijans didn't hesitate.  The moment the flashing light registered, he dashed forward, into the cell, pulling Barsh.  "Get him out of here!" he barked out, moving close to the man in the belief...however tenuous...that if something went off, his own body might absorb enough of the blast to leave their one witness intact enough to give Kourene vital information.

At Rhijan's urging, Juragga lunged forward and tried to grab Barsh, scooping him up into a protective hug, and then - if he had time - hustle him out the door, protecting him with his own mass.

"You've got that correct, You-Why," Shard gloomily agrees.  "I guess we can -"

Then the alarm, and things start to happen all-too-quickly.

Rhijans and Juragga head for Barsh.  "Get to safety!" Shard shoots at You-Why, indicating the door.  A glance to Haarmon to make sure he's thinking the same, and the older woman breaks into a run, making for the exit herself.  She has to get out first, clear the passage; this could be a setup.

Breathing rapid, hand inside her cloak, she palms the door open and steps into the breach.
This message was last edited by the player at 12:35, Mon 09 Mar 2015.

There is a brief moment of frenzied action.  Rhijans moves to act as a shield.  Juragga grabs Barsh.  Haarmon snatches up whatever gear he can and dashes towards the door, as does Shard.  You-Why starts to shuffle in the same direction, bewildered by the sudden flurry of activity, and not exactly built for speed...

And then it hits everybody at once.  It's an incoming call on the security console's comm panel.  The bleeping sound continues, and the light carries on flashing urgently.

You-Why looks around, "Should I answer that?  It might be important."

Haarmon stops, and has the decency to blush and look embarrassed.  "Guess we're all a bit on edge." he mutters.

Raising his hand, Barsh asks, "Shall I go back to the cell?"

Juragga dumped Barsh unceremoniously and gobbled furiously in embarrassment.  Something about 'With all the tension in this room you could cut it with a dewclaw'.

Rhijans slowed with the discovery that the sound was a call...slowed, but didn't relax.  "No," he said tersely to Barsh.  "Answer it," he said to You-Why, with a nod that might have been encouragement.

All the time, his hand rested on the butt of his blaster.  What he'd really like, if they were going to be stuck here, would be Barsh to be moved anonymously to somewhere else on the base...and himself left here to confront anyone who came looking for the man.  Detention areas were designed to keep people in, not out, although they did generally provide for pretty solid access control.

He looked over at Haarmon.  "See what you can do about closing us off...video monitoring in the access halls, security sealed doors, whatever you can manage."  The good thing was, they didn't have to worry about their escape getting cut off by a bunch of Imperial troops...

Unless things really went to hell...

"No worries, Juragga, and you hit that dead on, Haarmon.  Sorry, Barsh."  Shard's laugh is a touch brittle.  "Hey, if you needed proof we're looking out for you...."

Of course, a bunch of paranoiacs looking out for someone isn't necessarily reassuring.

Rhijans is on the call to the console.  Shard, instead, pulls out her com-link.  "Void-cursed Jawa-bait," she snarls, fiddling with the electronic.  It's not to that she refers her displeasure.  After a moment, she calls up the Colonel's office.

"I need to speak to the Colonel, ASAP.  This is Shard.  There's a woman - Doona Eskil - who is making a problem for us, and she might have some valuable information.  We need her cooperation, and I have a feeling the only person she'll give that to is the colonel."  And if she doesn't?  Well, she's withholding critical and non-personal information that's stonewalling an investigation into saboteurs on base.  That's enough for Shard to just toss her in a cell.

...far away from Barsh.

Shard can handle the witch part; she's been called worse, after all.  Much, much worse.  But lives are on the line, now.

You-Why takes the call, handling it politely and efficiently.  When it's finished, he announces, "There is, apparently, a fight in the hangar - tempers became frayed in a dispute regarding equipment.  They were wondering if Security could send a team over to deal with it.  I explained that there is nobody from Security here at the moment, and they used some disgusting language before disconnecting the call from their end."

Shard's call to Kourene meets with no more success - the Colonel is in conference with his senior staff at the moment, and not to be interrupted for anything less than an Imperial squadron entering orbit.  The aide who takes the call can't even tell Shard where, exactly, Kourene is.  Security around the meeting is that tight.  But he does promise to let the Colonel know that she needs to speak to him, just as soon as he returns to his office.

Haarmon nods slowly at Rhijans, "I can do that.  Do you want we to stop the movement checks on the lynch mob, or should I wait until those are finished.?"

Barsh shrugs, confused by Rhijans' terse denial, then stands uncomfortably, close to Juragga.  "Look, if somebody's trying to kill me, should I really be standing in front of an open door?"

Rhijans looked over at Barsh for a moment...and it seemed, for the briefest of moments, almost as though a look of amusement crossed his face.  It was there and gone so quickly that only someone who was familiar with his expressions (or lack thereof) and watching him would have picked it up.  But it was there.

"Pretty sure nobody said you had to stand in front of the doorway," he said to Barsh, and gestured to a space a little off to one side.

He turned to Haarmon.  "Finish the rundown on the mob.  I think we can muster enough firepower to discourage anyone rushing down the hall."

Unless the other accomplice...or one of the accomplices, if there are more...is in Security.  Then he could come down the hall without anyone noting his approach...could even be coming in heavily armed.

But there were a million maybes, ifs, and other variables out there and he could drive himself into a catatonic stupor trying to think through them all, much less come up with individual contingencies.  Keep it simple, stupid...

He took a position just inside the entrance to the detention block, off to one side.  He wasn't completely hidden from view of anyone who might be in the hall outside, but he was obscured enough that they'd need to get dangerously close to get a solid line on him.  From there, he glanced over at You-Why.  "Any chance you can tap into a security feed from the hangar deck, so we can see or at least hear what's going on up there?"  Someone trying to draw out Security at a time when they were all tied up with a special assignment was just enough to seem noteworthy to him...either someone trying to get out while Security was tied up, or trying to draw enough Security off the Colonel's meeting to create vulnerability for the brass in attendance.

Of course, it could be totally innocuous, as well...two captains with too much downtime on their hands, bickering over some piece of equipment in the belief that they had to be fixed NOW, in the belief that they might need to be spaceworthy immediately.  The only way to know was to see and/or hear what they were fighting about.

Juragga, still frustrated with his earlier embarrassment, rumbled a suggestion. "Why don't we just take him to Kourene and explain this?" he hooted.

A strangely quiet and studious Haarmon stared at the terminal screen, fingers tap-tap-tapping away as he accessed files and correlated data. It was often hard to describe to people what was hard to do on a terminal and what was easy. You want to tap into the security systems and open a door? Fairly easy. All systems had a defined set of IF.... THENS... that told it when the doors open and when they close. Come down on the right side of the logic tests and you're good.

Find information based on a candid, in-action picture? Far harder. Computers were built for YES and NO. 'Maybe' was difficult. But slowly, carefully, he was able to gather the names and positions of the people in the mob and start to teach the system how to find them on the camlogs.

But, like pushing any giant rock down a big hill, the hardest art was getting it moving. Once you set the parameters, told the network what the IFs' and THEN's were, it was all just waiting and tweaking.

Once he was done that, closing off the detention area as child's play.

Moving hastily aside, Barsh gives Rhijans a nervous grin, "Sorry.  Not used to this sort of thing."  You-Why shuffles away from the door, seeming dejected by the lack of interrogation opportunities presented by the current situation.

Then Haarmon gives him a distraction.  "I am not an astromech unit, of course, but I can try."  He surveys the console for a moment, then, "Do you know where I can access a dataport?  Is this one?  The configuration looks a little odd." 

A still image of the lynch mob appears before Haarmon, and several reticules appear, bracketing faces in the crowd.  Then, one by one, more images appear.  Images from the base's personnel archives, medical records, security files.  Each of them is a portrait, and each portrait is a match for the selected faces on the main image.

After a few moments the screen changes, displaying only the portraits, and alongside each one there is a name, and a few personal details.

Then the system starts searching through the surveillance logs... and immediately starts returning hits.  Unfortunately each of those hits indicates that the person in question was here, in the security facility, a short while ago.  With varying degrees of patience, everybody waits as the system looks back through older and older records...

Rhijans glanced over toward the consoles, from where he was holding watch on the outer hall.  "Don't know if it's too late, now that you've got a search running...but see if you can find anything on Volan Reise in there...and if any of our lynch mob were associates of his.  If that can be done without interrupting the search or slowing it down too much."

Reise was the key.  If he wasn't the spy, he was working for the spy...possibly set up, himself, to be a fall-guy, the same way he'd set up Barsh.  Either way, he was the point of attack.  "If he is the spy, he may have others that he's either set up like Barsh or is using to create his own little network here...because I don't think he'd have access to all the mission information that leaked to the Empire.  If he's not the spy, he's an intermediary that the spy is using to be a face for the operation.  So if we can isolate his connections in the base, we can start tracking down just who's truly culpable for all of this."

Flicking off her comm, Shard shakes her head. "No luck with the colonel.  He's in a meeting or something, won't be available until later.  I've left a message of utmost urgency..."

Her lips tighten.  "All right.  I think it's time to use the go-ahead the colonel gave us.  One of us should just go down there and interrupt the void-cursed meeting.  They said 'no interruptions except an Imperial Squadron entering orbit, which is exactly what we're trying to prevent."

She snorts a laugh.  "So I'll go.  I'm more than happy to suffer under the colonel's displeasure just to deal with this issue."  The older woman eyes Haarmon and You-Why. "Good point, Rhijans.  How are we doing on that search, You-Why?  Haarmon?  Maybe we can get something to take to the colonel there, as well."

Haarmon sighs, "The search will take a while.  There's a void-cursed lot of security footage to go through.  I set it up to check recent records first, because we aren't interested in what people were doing two years ago, only what they've done recently.  But even so... "

He takes a moment to point You-Why to a port that won't fry his processors if he jacks into it.  The droid, apparently pleased to be doing an important task to aid the investigation starts work immediately.

"I'm not finding much correlation on these movements." Haarmon declares after a while, "It seems that the mob all knew a lot of people around here, but there's nothing to show that they were an organised floating riot."

"Sir." You-Why interrupts, "It looks as though the trouble started in the hanger because a tech accused another of taking a hydrospanner from his tool kit.  From there it escalated.  Tensions have, apparently been running high, of late."

Rhijans nodded...he'd expected about as much with regards to the lynching crowd.  "As you can nail down IDs on them, we can start to narrow the search a bit.  Anyone who's on Kourene's Clear list, we can stop searching...focus the resources on the unknowns and the ones we're not sure about."

He glanced over at You-Why as the droid reported on the situation down on the hangar deck.  "Can't imagine why anyone would feel tense," he quipped drily.

Speaking up, he added, "Any chance you can scroll back and see just who was fooling around with the tool-kit in question?"  His eyes narrowed as he continued, "Could be totally innocuous...could be someone trying to create confusion.  Knowing who did it could make all the difference in how to deal with it."

He was grasping, he knew...but at this point, every potential lead became important, at least for the moment it took to make sure it didn't go anywhere.

Juragga looked from person to person as each spoke, starting to feel like he was watching a tennis match.

"GRAAAAAAAAwwwwwwrrr," he warbled by way of comment.  I'm hungry.

Haarmon shook his head and logged out of the terminal with a muttered curse. "No good. I think we need to go see Kourene. Tell him what's what. And he promised me some information on prior incidents. I need some time to sit down, write some scripts, tweak the results. Terminals like questions with definite starting points. "S'too many variables to get anything useful here."

He smiled at Juragga's comment. It was reassuring to know that, whatever happened, Rags was Rags.

"Why don't you guys go see Kourene? I'll head back to my room and dig into this a little more."

Rhijans scowled slightly...and nodded.  "Take Juragga with you...none of us should be walking around alone at this point.  I was hoping to chase this all down before anyone really had time to react to the fact that we were looking for our security leak, but at this point, it's too late for that, word's already out."  He gestured around the detention area.

"The fact that we had a welcoming committee when we got here is proof of that."  It still bothered him that what had been intended to be a few quiet questions in a secluded hallway had been recognized, somehow, as the team hunting for the Imperial spy, but without querying each member of the would-be lynch mob, there was no way of knowing if it had been a lack of discretion on the part of Shard or himself that had given it away, or if it had been someone that had somehow listened in...someone with a vested interest in making sure Barsh got blamed for the whole thing.

"The three of us will take Barsh to talk to the Colonel and see what we can get to facilitate the search."  He looked at Shard, and You-Why...Shard, to gauge her reaction to the idea, and the droid because...well...he didn't want to ignore it.  Though he was a little on edge at the notion of the droid's enthusiasm for interrogating Barsh.

He was supposed to be the cold, soulless, businesslike professional, and he hadn't been anywhere near that eager to ask the man questions in THAT way...

Shard shoots a quick nod to Haarmon.  "Good plan.  Juragga can grab something to eat on the way."  That said with a small laugh. "Been a little long, hasn't it?"  She shakes her head.  "As for going to the colonel...I think we have to.  I don't like the idea of bringing Barsh, simply because that puts him in the open.  But it's not anything anyone would expect, and it's better than leaving him here alone."

A quick pat on Barsh's arm follows. "We're not going to do that," Shard mutters.  Then she paces in a small circle, thinking hard.  "I wish we had time to get to requisitions.  I'd love to get some kind of armor for you, Barsh.  Maybe a weapon, as well.  If things go poorly, I want you armed."

She's not worried about Barsh's guilt, not any more.

"For now, let's just get you to see the colonel."

Slowly an alternate plan starts to take shape.  Haarmon and Juragga will head for their quarters, where Haarmon will work on creating a tool to make the checks on the lynch mob more efficient, while Juragga eats.

Shard and Rhijans will go to see the Colonel.  The immediate hitch being that he's apparently in a meeting.  Somewhere,  The aide that Shard had spoken to had been very non-specific about the venue.  Given the recent security issues, it seems natural that there would be a certain amount of secrecy surrounding the meeting location.  Especially if it involves the Colonel and a number of the higher-ranking base personnel.

You-Why looks backwards through the records of the trouble in the hangar, and eventually declares, "Here.  These two techs were, eventually, involved in the fracas.  They were working on two fighters that stand next to each other.  This one searches for something among his tools, apparently without success, then goes to borrow an item from the other's equipment.  He doesn't ask, because the second tech is not about.  When the second man returns, he also searches for a tool, then notices that the first tech is using borrowed equipment."

Then the droid continues, "If I might make a suggestion?  It might speed up your investigation if you find out who, exactly, in the infirmary contacted Doona Eskil with the information that you had been seen talking to Barsh."

"Oh my, I do believe I have a knack for this sort of activity.  It is rather enjoyable."

Rhijans managed to keep the grimace that came to his face to a tight-lipped grin, with no humor behind it at all.  "Do you have some suggestion on just how to do that?  Seeing as how I asked Eskil that very question and she did the commlink equivalent of spitting in my eye, I don't hold out much faith that she's going to suddenly have a change of heart."

He shrugged, and added, "I mean, we could track her down and threaten to shoot her for failing to cooperate with an investigation sanctioned by Colonel Kourene...but I wouldn't put much faith in any answers we get that way."  The grimace returned, growing almost to a snarl, before he continued, "And if she's particularly stubborn on the issue, it would mean I'd actually have to shoot her.  And I don't think that would do much for the current state of morale..."

Juragga would follow Haarmon, always.  But as he began to saunter forth in search of food (and watcing Haarmon's back) he mused, "RrrrUUUUhhhhrrGGGhHH?" Who's watching Barsh again?

Haarmon shook his head ruefully at You-why's suggestion. It was odd to have him helping them instead of judging them. But it was a good suggestion. Rhijans seemed about ready to shoot something, anything, if it meant making forward progress. And Shard was keeping the peace.

Haarmon tapped the droid on the shoulder. "Hey, Iron Undies, why don't you come with us? You can help me with my security filters. And maybe give me some tips on intrigue and espionage while you're at it. Let the smart people over there do what they gotta do. And we'll stop off at the caff on the way, Rags. Get you some food."

And with that he started herding his little posse out of the room.

Juragga's question did stop him, however. He paused. "Yeah, you guys okay to watch Barsh while you go looking for the Colonal? We could take him with us, I guess. Let Rags have the watching of him. If you think it'd, you know, help."

"oooOOOuuurrggh," Juragga commented. If we leave him alone, we'll never see him again alive.  That's just how these things work.