Ship Who Searched (31 page)

“How do you mean?” Alex asked.

“Like—somebody’s kid’s idea of a treasure place. Caves, lots of ’em, some of ’em dug up, all of ’em prob’ly had stuff in ’em.” Hank’s voice started to slur with fatigue, but he seemed willing to continue, so Tia let him.

“Anyway, I got down there, grabbed some of the good stuff, took lots of holos so if I ever figured out where it was, I could stake a legal claim on it.” He sighed. “I was keepin’ my mouth shut, partly ’cause I don’t trust these company goons, partly ’cause I figured on goin’ back as soon as I got cured.” He coughed, unhappily. “Well, it don’t much look like I’m gonna get cured up any time soon, does it?”

“I can’t promise anything but the pain meds, Hank,” Tia said softly.

“Yeah.” He licked cracked and swollen lips with a pale tongue. “Look, you get into my ship. See if the damn recorder was workin’ at all. Get them holos, see if you can figure out where the devil I was from ’em. You guys are CS, ev’body knows you can trust CS—if there’s anything I can get outa this, see what you can do, okay?” The last was more of a pathetic plea than anything else.

“Hank, I can guarantee you this much—since you’ve cooperated, there’s some kind of reward system with MedService for people who cooperate in closing down plagues,” Alex said, after a few moments of checking with regs. “It includes all medical covered—including prosthetics and restorations—and full value of personal possessions confiscated or destroyed. That should include your ship and cargo. We’ll itemize the
real
value of your cargo if we can.”

Hank just sighed—but it sounded relieved. “Good,” he replied, his voice fading with exhaustion. “Knew I could . . . trust CS. Lissen, can I get some’f that pain med now?”

Tia logged the authorization and activated the servo-nurse. “Coming up, Hank,” she said. The man turned his head slightly as he heard the whine of the motor, and his eyes followed the hypospray until it touched his arm. “From now on, you just voice-activate the servo—tell it ‘DM-Tia’ and it will know what to give you.” There was a hiss—then for one moment, what was left of his swollen lips curved in something like a smile. Tia closed down the link, after locking in the “on-demand” authorization. It would take someone from CenCom MedServices to override it now.

Meanwhile, Alex had been arguing with Dock Services, and finally had to pull rank on them to get access to the controls for the dock servos and remotes. Once that was established, however, it was a matter of moments for Tia to tie herself in and pick out a servo with a camera still inside the quarantined area to send into the ship.

She selected the most versatile she could find; one with a crawler base, several waldos of various size and strength, and a reasonable optical pickup. “We aren’t going to tell them that hard vacuum kills the bugs yet, are we?” she asked, as she activated the servo and sent it crawling towards the abandoned dock.

“Are you kidding?” Alex snorted. “Given the pass-the-credit attitude around here, I may never tell them. Let Kenny do it, if he wants, but I’d be willing to bet that the moment we tell them, they’ll seal off the section and blow it, then go in and help themselves to whatever’s on Hank’s ship before we get a chance to make a record of it.”

“I won’t take that bet,” she replied, steering the crawler up the ramp and into the still-gaping airlock.

Hank hadn’t exaggerated when he’d said his ship was a wreck; it had more patches and make-dos on it than she had dreamed possible on a ship still in space and operating. Half the wall-plates were gone on the inside of the lock; the floor-plates were of three different colors. And when she brought the crawler into the control cabin, it was obvious that the patchworking probably extended to the entire ship.

Exposed wiring was everywhere; the original control panels had long ago been replaced by panels salvaged from at least a dozen other places. Small wonder the ship had a tendency to fall out of hyper; she was surprised it ever managed to stay
in
hyper, with all the false signals that should be coming off those boards.

“You think the recorder caught where he went?” Alex asked doubtfully, peering at the view in the screen. The lighting was in just as poor shape as everything else, but Tia had some pretty sophisticated enhancement abilities, and the picture wasn’t too bad. The ship’s “black box” recorder, that
should
have registered everything this poor old wreck had done, was in no better shape than the rest of the ship.

“Either it did, or it didn’t,” she said philosophically. “We’ll have a pattern of where he was supposed to
be
going, though, and where he thought he was heading when he left our little plague-spot. We should be able to deduce the general area from that.”

“Ah, and since we know the planetary type, if Survey ever found it, we’ll know where it is.” Alex nodded as his hands raced across the keyboards, helping Tia with the complex servo. “Look, there’s the com, I think. Get the servo a little closer, and I’ll punch up a link to us.”

“Right.” She maneuvered the crawler in between two seats with stuffing oozing out of cracks in the upholstery, and got the servo close enough to the panel that Alex could reach it with one of the waldos. While he punched in their access com-code, she activated the black box, plugged the servo into it, and put it on com uplink mode with another waldo. She would have shaken her head, if she could have. Not only was all of this incredibly jury-rigged, it actually looked as if many of the operations that should have been automatic had deliberately been made manual.

“I can’t believe this stuff,” she said, finally. “It must have taken both hands and feet to fly this wreck!”

“It probably did,” Alex observed. “A lot of the old boys are like that. They don’t trust AIs, and they’ll tell you long stories about how it’s because someone who was a friend of a friend had trouble with one and it nearly killed him or wrecked his ship. The longer they stay out here, the odder they get that way.”

“And CenCom worries about
us
going loonie,” she replied, making a snorting sound. “Seems to me there’s a lot more to worry about with one of these old rock-rats—”

“Except that there’s never been a case of one of them going around the bend in a way that endangered more than a couple of people,” Alex replied. Just about then, one of Tia’s incoming lines activated. “There. Have I got you live, lover?”

“Yes, and I’m downlinking now.” The black box burped its contents at her in a way that made her suspect more than one gap in its memory-train.
Oh well. Maybe we’ll get lucky.
“Should we go check out the holds now?”

“Not the holds, the cabin,” Alex corrected. “The holds will probably be half-full of primary-processed metals, or salvage junk. He’ll have put his loot from the site in the cabins, if it was anything good.”

“Good enough.” She backed the servo out, carefully, hoping to avoid tangling it in anything. Somehow she actually succeeded; she wasn’t quite sure how. She had no real “feeling” from this servo; no sense of where its limbs were, no feedback from the crawler treads. It made her appreciate her shipbody all that much more. With the kinesthetic input from her skin sensors and the internals, she knew where everything was at all times, exactly as if she had grown this body herself.

There were two cabins off the main one; the first was clearly Hank’s own sleeping quarters, and Tia was amazed at how neat and clean they were. Somehow she had expected a rat’s nest. But she recalled the pictures of the control room as she turned the servo to the other door, and realized that the control room had been just as neat and clean—

It was only the myriad of jury-rigs and quick-fix repairs that had given the impression of a mess. There wasn’t actually any garbage in there—the floor and walls were squeaky-clean. Hank ran as clean a ship as he could, given his circumstances.

The second door was locked; Alex didn’t even bother with any kind of finesse. Hank’s ship would be destroyed at this point, no matter what they did or didn’t do. One of the waldos was a small welding torch; Alex used it to burn out the lock.

The door swung open on its own, when the lock was no longer holding it. Tia suddenly knew how Lord Carnavon felt, when he peeked through the hole bored into the burial chamber of Tutankhamen.

“‘Wonderful things!’” she breathed, quoting him half-unconsciously.

Hank must have worked like a madman to get everything into that cabin. This
was
treasure, in every sense of the word. There was nothing in that cabin that did not gleam with precious metal or the sleekness of consummate artistry. Or both. The largest piece was a statue about a meter tall, of some kind of stylized winged creature. The smallest was probably one of the rings in the heaps of jewelry piled into the carved stone boxes on the floor—which were themselves works of high art. If Hank could claim even a fraction of this legally, he could buy a new ship and still be a wealthy man.

If he lived to enjoy his wealth, that is.

He had stowed his loot very carefully, Tia saw, with the same kind of neat, methodical care that showed in his own cabin. Every box of jewelry was carefully strapped to the floor; every vase was netted in place. Every statue was lying on the bunk and held down by restraints. The cabin had been crammed as full as possible and still permit the door to open, but every single piece had been neatly stowed and then secured, so that no matter what the ship did, none of it would break loose. And so that none of it would damage anything else.

“Have we got enough pictures?” Alex asked faintly. “I’m being overcome by gold-fever. I’d like to look for those holos before my avarice gets the better of my common sense, and I go running down there to dive into that stuff myself.”

“Right!” Tia said hastily, and backed the servo out again. The door swung shut after it, and Alex heaved a very real sigh of relief.

“Sorry, love,” he said apologetically. “I never thought I’d ever react like that.”

“You’ve never been confronted with several million credits’-worth of gold alone,” she replied soothingly. “I don’t even want to think what the real value of all of that is. Do you think he’d keep the holos in his cabin?”

“There’s no place to stash them out in the control room,” Alex pointed out.

Once again, Hank’s neat and methodical nature saved the day for them, and Tia knew why he hadn’t bothered to tell them where he’d put his records. Once they entered his cabin, there next to a small terminal was a drawer marked “Records,” and in the drawer were the hardcopy claim papers he’d intended to file and the holos he’d taken in a section marked “Possible Claims.”

“Luck’s on our side today,” Alex marveled. Tia agreed. It would have been
far
more likely that they’d have gotten some victim who’d refuse to divulge anything, or one who’d been half-crazed—or one who simply hadn’t kept any kind of a record at all.

Luck was further on their side; he’d made datahedron copies of everything, including the holos, and
those
could be uplinked to AH-One-Oh-Three-Three. There would be no need to bring anything out of the quarantined dock area.

It took them several hours to find a way to bring up the reader in the control cabin, then link the reader into the com system, but once they got a good link established, it was a matter of nanoseconds and the precious recordings were theirs.

She guided the servo towards the lock and swiveled the optic back for a last look—and realized that
she
still had control over a number of the ship’s functions via the servo.

“Alex,” she said slowly, “it would be a terrible thing if the airlock closed and locked, wouldn’t it? That would mean even if station ops blew the section to decontaminate it, they wouldn’t be able to get into the ship—or even get it undocked. They’d never know
exactly
what was on board.”

Alex blinked in bewilderment for a moment—then slowly grinned. “That
would
be terrible, wouldn’t it?” he agreed. “Well, goodness, Tia, I imagine that they’d probably dither around about it until somebody from CenCom showed up—somebody with authority to confiscate it and hold it for decontamination and evaluation.”

“Of course,” she continued smoothly, sending a databurst to the servo, programming it to get the airlock to shut and lock up. “And you know, these old ships are
so
unreliable—what if something happened to the ship’s systems that made it vent to vacuum? Why then, even if the station managers decided to try and short-circuit the lock, they couldn’t get it open against a hard vacuum. They’d have to bring in vacuum-welders and cut the locks open—and that would damage their own dock area. That would just be such an inconvenience.”

“It certainly would—” Alex said, stifling a laugh.

She sent further instructions to the ship and noted with glee the ship proceeding to vent out the spaceward side. The servo noted hard vacuum on one of its sensors in a fairly reasonable length of time.

Satisfied that no one was going to be able to break into Hank’s ship and pilfer his treasure, she sent a last set of instructions to the servo, shutting it down until she sent it an activation key. No one was going to get into that ship without her cooperation.

Hank would get a finder’s fee, if nothing else, based on the value of the artifacts he had found. But now it would be based on the
true
value of what he had found, and not just what was left after the owners of Presley Station took their pick of the loot. Assuming they left anything at all.

“Well,” she said, when she had finished. “We’d better get to work. Are
you
any good at deciphering black box recordings?”

“Tolerably,” Alex replied. “Tell you what; you analyze the holos while I diddle the black box data, then we’ll switch.”

“Provided you don’t get gold-fever again,” she warned him, opening the data on his screens.

The holos showed exactly what Hank had reported; a series of caves—caves that looked to have been artificially cut into the bluffs beside the ruined buildings. The nearest were completely dug up, and plainly emptied, but beyond them, there was another series of caves that were open to the air and still held treasures. But this wasn’t like anything Tia had ever seen before. Each one of those caves, rather than being some kind of grave or other archeological entity, was clearly nothing more than a cache—and each one held precious objects from an entirely different culture than the one next to it. The two nearest the camera in the first holo held sacred objects from two cultures that were light-years apart—and from ages when neither civilization had attained even interplanetary flight, much less starflight.