The Ship Who Searched b-3

by Anne McCaffrey

  "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 vacuumwelders 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 actually cut into the bluffs beside the ruined building. 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 treasure. 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 lightyears apart, and from ages when neither civilization had attained even interplanetary flight, much less starflight.

  Furthermore, the more Tia studied the holos, the more she came to the conclusion that the original caches were old; never mind who was digging them up now. The kind of weathering of the surface and layering of detritus she saw in the holos took hundreds, perhaps thousands of years to build up. And the buildings in one of the other holos were very old.

  Nor did she recognize who could have constructed them.

  So who could have been responsible for collecting all these treasures in the first place? Why had they buried them? Where did they get it all, and above all, why didn't they come back after it?

  There was some evidence around the caves that the current looters had attempted to rebury their finds. But had they done so in an attempt to hide it again, or had they done it to try and kill the disease? How many of the looters were exposed? From the number of caves that had been broken into, it looked as if there had been quite a few people at work there.

  Tia wished she could sit back and chew a nail or something. All she had now were questions and no answers. And the lives of other people might hang in the balance.

  There was only one way to answer all those questions. They were going to have to find Hank's mystery planet and find out for themselves.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Tia didn't entirely trust the integrity of the Presley Station comcenter. She certainly expected that whatever she sent out would be monitored by the owners and their underlings. Unfortunately, there had been no provision for the need for secrecy in this mission; she had no codes and no scramblers. There had been no real reason to think that they would ever need such secrecy, so she was forced to send in the clear. Just to be on the safe side, she uplinked on her own and double-sent everything, but she knew that whatever she sent off that way would be subject to delays as it bounced from remote hyperwave relay-station to relay station, taking the long way 'home'.

  As she had expected, the owners of the station were quick to move on the information that Hank's ship contained treasure, despite the fact that no one should have read her messages back to Kenny and the rest. She was just grateful that the owners' first thought was to grab what they could from the nearby trove, and not to try and figure out where Hank came from, or attempt to force him to tell them.

  The first intimation that the communications had been leaked was when the station ops tried to claim the ship and all its contents for themselves; filing confiscation papers in the Central Systems Courts. When they discovered that Tia had already tied the ship and its contents up legally on Hank's behalf, they moved on the principle that 'possession is nine-tenths of the law, and the fellow arguing the other tenth has to prove it with a lawyer'.

  They sent crews into the docks, to try and get into the ship to strip it of as much as they could. Tia's cleverness thwarted them, as they worked their way, slowly, through every step she'd expected.

  She figured that by the time they were in a position to actually threaten Hank's possessions, the CS authorities would be on the scene in person. Meanwhile, she and Alex had some figuring to do. Where was Hank's cache-world? Same problem as before, except that this time the possible search area was smaller, and cone-shaped rather than spherical.

  Unfortunately, there were some other people who wanted to get their hands on that same information.

  And unknown to either of them, those people had decided that Alex and Tia were already privy to it.

  Tia kept a careful eye on the activity around her slip just on general principles, even when she wasn't feeling nervous, but given their current circumstances, and the fact that they were the only Central Systems ship out here at the moment, she couldn't help but feel a bit, well, paranoid. At the moment, only three people knew for certain that she was a brainship; Hank, the traffic control officer who brought them in, and that doctor. She was pretty certain that the doctor hadn't mentioned it to his superiors; she knew Hank hadn't told anyone, and as jittery as the other man had been, he'd probably forgotten it.

  No one addressed her when they called, at any rate, and she took pains to make callers think that she was an Al. So far, they seemed to be falling in with the deception. This wasn't a bad state of affairs; no one expected an AI to recognize dangers the way a real sentient could. She could tap into the optical scanners in the dock area around the ship and no one would have any notion that she was keeping watch. She made sure to schedule her three or four hours of DeepSleep while Alex was awake; normally taking them during his 'morning', while he was still rather grumpy and uncommunicative and she'd rather not talk to him anyway. And she scanned the recordings she made while she was under, just to be sure she didn't miss anything.

  That was why, a few days after their interview with Hank, she noticed the man in the dock-crew uniform coverall who seemed to be working double shifts. Except that no one else was working double shifts... and what was more, there was currently a company prohibition against overtime as a cost-cutting measure.

  Something wasn't right, and he never left the immediate area of her slip. What was he doing there? It wasn't as if she was either a
freighter with goods to load or unload, or a passenger liner. She didn't need servicing either. He never got close enough that she could see exactly what he was up to, but it seemed to her that he was doing an awful lot of make-work.

  She kept a close eye on him as he wandered around the dock area, purposefully, but accomplishing nothing that she could see. Gradually though, he worked his way in closer and closer to her slip, and little mental alarms began going off as she watched him and the way he kept glancing at her lock out of the corner of his eye.

  Around sixteen-hundred she watched him removing control-panel plates and cleaning in behind them, work too delicate to trust to a servo.

  Except that he'd just cleaned that same area two hours ago.

  That was senseless; regs stated that the panels only had to be cleaned once every two weeks, not every two hours.

  Furthermore, there was something not quite right with his uniform. It wasn't exactly the same color of gray as everyone else's; it looked crisply new, and the patches were just a little too bright There were plenty of dockworkers' uniforms in Presley storage, there was no reason for someone to have had a new one made up unless he was an odd size. And this man was as average as anyone could possibly be. He was so very unremarkable that she noticed his uniform long before she noticed him.

  That was bad enough, but just as seventeen-hundred passed and everyone else in the dock-crew went on supper break, another man in that too-new uniform showed up, while the first man kept on puttering about.

  "Alex?" she said, unhappily. "There's something going on out there I don't like."

  He looked up from his perusal of Hank's holos; he had prints made from them spread out all over the floor and was sitting on his heels beside them. "What's up?" She filled him in quickly, as a third and a fourth person in that same uniform ambled into the dock.

  There were now four crewman in the docks during break. All four of them in a dock area where there were no ships loading or unloading and no new ships expected to dock in the next twenty-four hours.

  "Tia, I don't like this either," he said, much to her relief, standing up and heading for the main console. "I want you to get the station manager online and see what-"

  Abruptly, as if someone had given the four men a signal, they dropped everything they were pretending to do and headed for her docking slip.

  Tia made a split-second decision, for within a few seconds they were going to be in her airlock.

  She slammed her airlock shut, but one of the men now running for her lock had some kind of black box in his hands; she couldn't trust that he might not be able to override her own lock controls. "Alex!" she cried, as she frantically hot-keyed her engines from cold-start. "They're going to board!"

  As Alex flung himself at his acceleration couch, she sent off a databurst to the station manager and hit the emergency override on her side of the dock.

  The dockside airlock doors slammed shut, literally in the faces of the four men approaching. Another databurst to the docking-slip controls gave her an emergency uncouple, there weren't too many pilots who knew about that kind of override, still in place from the bad old days when captains had to worry about pirates and station-raiders. She gave her insystem attitude thrusters a kick and shoved free of the dock altogether, frantically switching to external optics and looking for a clear path out to deep space.

  As her adrenaline level kicked up, her reactions went into overdrive, and what had been real-time became slow motion. Alex sailed ungracefully through the air, lurching for his chair; to her, the high-speed chatter of comlinks between AIs slowed to a drawl. Calculations were going on in her subsystems that she was only minimally aware of; a kind of background murmur as she switched from camera to camera, looking for the trouble she knew must be out there.

  "The chair Alex," she got out, just in time to spot a bee-craft, the kind made for outside construction work on the station, heading straight for her. Behind it were two men in self-propelled welder-suits. Someone had stolen or requisitioned station equipment, and they were going to get inside her no matter what the consequences were. Accidents in space were so easy to arrange.

  Alex wasn't strapped down yet. She couldn't wait.

  She spun around as Alex leapt for his couch, throwing him off-balance, and blasted herself out of station-space with a fine disregard for right of way and inertia as he grabbed and caught the arm of the chair.

  Alex slammed face-first into the couch, yelped in pain at the impact, and clung with both hands.

  Another small craft heading for her with the purposeful acceleration of someone who intended to ram. She poured on the speed, all alarms and SOS signals blaring, while Alex squirmed around and fastened himself in, moaning. His nose dripped blood down the side of his face, and his lip poured scarlet where he'd bitten or cut it.

  She dove under the bow of a tug, delaying her pursuer. Who was in on this? Was this something the High Families were behind? Surely not. Please, not.

  She continued to accelerate, throwing off distress signals even onto the relays, dumping real-time replays into message bursts every few seconds. Another tug loomed up in front of her; she sideslipped at the last moment, skimming by the Al-driven ship so close that it shot attitude thrusters out in all directions, the AI driven into confusion by her wild flying.

  The ship behind was still coming on; no longer gaining, but not losing any ground either.

  But with all the fuss that Tia was putting up, even Presley Station couldn't ignore the feet that someone was trying to jack her. Especially not with Central Systems investigators due any day, and with the way she was dumping her records onto the relays. If 'they' were allied with the station, 'they' wouldn't be able to catch everything and wipe it. If AH One-Oh-Three-Three disappeared, she was making it very hard for the claim of 'accident' to hold any water. I hope.

  As Tia continued to head for deep space, a patrol craft finally put in an appearance, cutting in between her and her pursuer, who belatedly turned to make a run for it.

  Tia slowed, and stopped, and held her position, as the adrenaline in her blood slacked off. I remember panting, I remember shivering. I'd do both even now, if I could. As it was, errant impulses danced along her sensors, ghost-feelings of the might-have-been of weapon fire, tractor beams.

  Slow heart. It's all right. Gradually her perception slowed back down to real-time, and the outside world 'sped up'. That was when the station manager himself hailed her.

  "Of course I'm sure they were trying to break in," she snapped in reply to his query, re-sending him her recordings, with close-ups on suspicious bulges under the coveralls that were the right size and placement for needlers and other weapons. She followed that with the bee-craft and the two men in the welding-suits... headed straight for her. "And those pursuit-craft certainly were not my imagination!" She raised her voice, both in volume and pitch. "I happen to be a fully trained graduate of Lab Schools, you know! I'm not in the habit of imagining things!"

  Now her adrenaline kicked in again, but this time from anger. They'd been in real danger, they could have been killed! And this idiot was talking to her as if she was some kind of, of joy-riding tweenie!

  "I never said they were, ma'am," the station manager replied, taken somewhat aback. "I,"

  Just what kind of station are you running where a CS craft can be subject to this kind of security breach?" she continued wrathfully, running right over the top of him, now that she had the upper hand and some verbal momentum. "I'm reporting this to the Central Worlds Sector Coordinator on my own comlink."

  "You don't need to do that ma-"

  "And furthermore, I am standing off-station until you can give me a high-security slip!" she continued, really getting warmed up and ready to demand all the considerations due a PTA. "My poor brawn is black and blue from head to toe from the knocking around he took and lucky it wasn't worse! I want you to question these people,"

  "We're taking care of that, ma-"

  "And I want to know everything
you learn from them before I dock again!" she finished, with a blast of feedback that punctuated her words and made him swear under his breath as the squeal pierced his ears. "Until then, I am going to sit out here and clog your approach lanes, and I don't particularly care whether or not you like it!"

  And with that, she put him on 'record' and let him splutter into a datahedron while she turned her attention to Alex.

  He had a wad of tissues at his face, trying to staunch the blood from nose and lip, and his eyes above the tissues were starting to puff and turn dark. He was going to look like a raccoon before too long, with a double set of black eyes.

  Obviously the first thing that had impacted with the couch was his face.

  "Alex?" she said timidly. "Oh, Alex, I'm so sorry. I didn't mean, there wasn't time,"

  "Ith awright," he replied thickly. "You did okay. Din hab mush shoice. Hanneled ev'thing great, hanneled him great. You arn gon moof for wile?"

  She correctly interpreted that as praise for her handling of the situation and a query as to whether or not she planned on moving.