The Ship Who Searched b-3

by Anne McCaffrey

  It was fairly obvious that he was itching to get to a comset and get in contact with MedServices, thus, symbolically at least, passing the problem up the line. If his bosses cared about where the miner had picked up the infection, they hadn't told him about it.

  Not too surprising. He was a company doctor. He was supposed to be treating execs for indigestion, while his underlings patched up miners after bar fights and set broken bones after industrial accidents. The worst he was ever supposed to see was an epidemic of whatever new influenza was going around. He was not supposed to have to be dealing with a plague, at least, not by his way of thinking. Traffic control was supposed to be keeping plague ships from ever coming near the station.

  "Thanks for your cooperation, Doctor," Alex said genially. "Get that link set up for us, if you would, and we'll leave you to your work."

  The doctor signed off, still without identifying himself, not that Tia was worried. Her recordings were enough for any legal purposes, and at this point, now that he had passed authority on to them, he was a nonentity. They didn't need to talk to him anymore. What they needed was currently incarcerated in an isolation room on that station, and they were going to have to figure out how to get him to talk to them.

  "Okay, Alex," she said when the screen was safely blank. "You're a lot closer to being an expert on this than I am. How do we get a rock-rat to tell us what we want to know?"

  "Hank, my name's Alex," the brawn said, watching the screen and all the patient-status readouts alongside. "I'm a brawn from CS, on loan to MedServices; you'll hear another voice in a moment, and that's my brainship, Tia."

  "Hello, Hank," she said, very glad that she was safely encased in her column with no reactions for Hank to read. Alex was doing a good job of acting; one she knew she would never be able to match. Just looking at Hank made her feel twitchy, shivery, and quite uncomfortable; sensations she hadn't known she could still have. "I don't know if anyone bothered to tell you, but we were sent out here because there's someone else with what you've got; it's very contagious, and we're trying to keep it from turning into a plague. Will you help us?"

  "Give him the straight story," Alex had said; Kenny had agreed to that when they got hold of him, right after the company doctor had called him. "There's no point in trying to trick him. If he knows how bad off he is, he just might be willing to cooperate."

  The sores only grew worse when you bandaged them, so Hank was lying in a gel-bed, a big pan full of goo, really, with a waterbed mattress beneath the goo. Right now only the opaque green gel covering him was keeping him from outraging modesty. The gel was a burn-treatment, and something Kenny had come up with for the other man. He was still alive, but no better than when they had left. They still had no idea who or what he was, besides horribly unlucky.

  Hank peered up at the screen in the corner of his room, through a face grotesquely swollen and broken out. "These company goons won't give me any kind of a straight story," he said hoarsely. "All they do is try an’ brush me off. How bad off am I?"

  "There's no cure," Alex said, flatly. "There's one other known victim. The other man is worse than you, and they haven't found anything to reverse his condition. That's the truth."

  Hank cursed helplessly for about four or five minutes straight before he ran out of breath and words. Then he lay back in the gel-bed for another couple of minutes with his eyes closed.

  Tia decided to break the silence. "I don't know how you feel about the rest of the universe, Hank, but, we need to know where you came down with this. If this got loose in any kind of population,"

  "'S'all right, lady," he interrupted, eyes still closed. "You're preachin' to the choir. Ain't no percentage in keeping my mouth shut now." He sighed, a sound that sounded perilously close to a sob. "I run across this place by accident, and I ain't sure how I'd find it again, but you guys might be able to. I give you what data I got. I'd surely hate t' see a kid in the shape I'm in right now."

  "Thanks, Hank," Alex said, with quiet gratitude. "I wish there was something we could do for you. Can you think of anything you'd like?"

  Hank shook his head just a little. "Tell you what; I got some serious hurt here, an' what they're given me ain't doin' much, 'cause they're 'fraid I'm gonna get hooked. You make these bozos give me all the pain meds I ask for, if I ever get cured up, I'll dry out then. You think you can do that for me?"

  "I'll authorize it," Tia said firmly. At Alex's raised eyebrow, she printed: Kenny's authorizations include patient treatments. We've got that power, and it seems cruel not to give him that much relief.

  Alex nodded. "Okay, Hank, my partner says she can boss the docs here. So, fire away; we're recording. Unless you want something now."

  "Naw. I wanta stay on this planet long enough t' give you what little info I got." Hank coughed. "First off, my boat's an old wreck; falls outa hyper all the time, and the recorder don't always work when she takes a dive. Basically, what happened was she fell out, and there was a Terra-type planet not too far from where she dropped. My holds was pretty empty, so I figured I'd see if there was anything around. Registered somethin' that looked like wrecked buildings in one spot, went down t' take a look-see."

  "That was where you caught this thing?" Alex asked.

  "I'm gettin' to that. Weren't no signs of life, okay. But there was some buildings there, old and kinda' busted up, round, like them flyin' saucers people used to see. I figgered maybe I'd hit some place where the archies hadn't got to, mebbe I could pick up something I could peddle. I went ahead an' landed, okay? Only I found somethin' that looked like somebody else had been there first. Looked like, I dunno, like somebody'd been collectin' and hoardin' for a long long time, buryin' the stuff in caves by the building, stashin' it in the buildings that wasn't busted up. Some of it was dug up already, some of it somebody'd just started t'dig up."

  "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 still 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 servonurse. "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 C
enCom 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 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 cabins," 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 intende
d 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.