There was a message waiting for Tia when they returned to the main base at Central, with Doctor Haakon-Fritz still confined to quarters. A completely mysterious message. Just the words, "Call this number," a voice-line number for somewhere in the L-5 colonies, and an ID-code she recognized as being from Lars.
Now what was Lars up to?
Puzzled, she left the message in storage until Alex completed the complicated transfer of their not-quite-prisoner, and accompanied him and duplicate copies of the records involving him down to the surface. Only then, when she was alone, did she make the call.
"Friesner, Sherman, Stirling and Huff," said a secretary on the first ring. There was no delay, so Tia assumed that the office was somewhere in one of the half-dozen stations or L-5 colonies nearby. "Investment brokers."
"I was told to call this number," Tia said cautiously. "I—my name is Hypatia Cade—" She hesitated as she almost gave her ship-numbers instead of her name.
"Ah, Miz Cade, of course," the secretary said, sounding pleased. "We've been waiting for you to call. Let me explain the mystery; Friesner, Sherman, Stirling and Huff specialize in investments for shellpersons like yourself. A Mister Lars Mendoza at Pride of Albion opened an account for you here to manage the investments you had already made. If you'll hold, I'll see if one of the partners is free—"
Tia hated to be put on hold, but it wasn't for more than a microsecond. "Miz Cade," said a hearty-sounding male voice, "I'm Lee Stirling; I'm your broker if you want to keep me on, and I have good news for you. Your investments at Largo Draconis have done very well. Probably much better than you expected."
"I don't know about that," she replied, letting a little humor leak through. "My expectations were pretty high." There was something about that voice that sounded familiar, but she couldn't identify it. Was it an accent—or rather, lack of one?
"But did you expect to triple your total investment?" Lee Stirling countered. "Your little seed money grew into quite the mighty oak tree while you were gone!"
"Uh—" she said, taken so much by surprise that she didn't know what to say. "What do you mean by total investment?"
"Oh—your companies split their bonds two times while you were gone; you had the option of cash or bonds, and we judged you wanted the bonds, at least while the value was still increasing." Stirling was trying to sound matter-of-fact, but couldn't keep a trace of gloating out of his voice. "Those bonds are now worth three times what they were after the last split."
"Split?" she said faintly. "I—uh—really don't know what that means. I'm—new at this."
Patiently Stirling walked her through exactly what had happened to her investment. "Now the question you have in front of you is whether you want to sell out now, while the value of the bond is still increasing, or whether you want to wait."
"What's happening on Largo Draconis?" she asked. After all, her investment had been based on what was going to happen in the real world, not the strange and unpredictable universe of the stock market. And from the little she had seen, the universe of the stock market seemed to have very little to do with "real" reality.
"I thought you'd ask that. Your companies have pretty much saturated their market," Stirling told her. "The situation has stabilized—just short of disaster, thanks to them. The bond prices are going up, but a lot more slowly. I think they're going to flatten out fairly soon. I'd get out, if I were you."
"Do it," she said flatly. "I'd like you to put everything I earned into Moto-Prosthetics, preferred stock, with voting rights. Hold onto the seed money until I contact you."
"Taking care of it now—there. All logged in, Hypatia. I'm looking forward to seeing what you're going to invest in next." Stirling sounded quite satisfied. "I hope you'll stay with us. We're a new firm, but we're solid, we have a lot of experience, and we intend to service our clients with integrity. Miz Friesner was formerly a senior partner in Weisskopf, Dixon, Friesner and Jacobs, and the rest of us were her handpicked proteges. She's our token softie."
"Token—oh! You're all—"
"Shellpersons, right, all except Miz Friesner. Oh, we all worked on the stock, bond, and commodity exchanges, but as systems managers. We couldn't do any investments while we were systems managers, but Miz Friesner agreed to join us when we bought out our contracts." Stirling chuckled. "We've been planning this for a long time. Now we're relying on grapevine communications within the shell-net for those like us who want to invest, for whatever reasons—and would rather not go through either their Counselors, their Supervisors, or their Advocates." He sent her a complicated burst of emoticons conveying a combination of disgust, weariness, annoyance, and impatience. "We are adults, after all. We can think for ourselves. Just because we're rooted to one spot or one structure, it doesn't follow that all of us need keepers."
She sent back a burst that mirrored his—with the addition of amusement. "Some of us do—but not anyone who's been out in the world for more than fifty years or so, I wouldn't think. Well, I'll tell a couple of friends of mine about you, that's for certain."
"Word of mouth, as I said." Stirling laughed. "I have to tell you, after that phenomenal start, we're all very interested in your next investment choice."
"I'll have it in a couple of days at most," she promised, and signed off.
Well, now it was certainly time to start digging for that second choice, and she couldn't hope to happen on it the way she had the last time.
This time, it was going to take a combination of stupidity on someone's part, and her own computational power. So she concentrated on sorting out those colonies that had been in existence for less than a hundred years. It was probably fair to assume that anything repetitive that she would be able to take advantage of would have to take place within that kind of cycle.
That narrowed the field quite a bit—but it meant that she was going to have to concentrate her search by categories. Floods were the first things that came to mind, so she called up geological and climatological records on all of her candidates and ran a search for flood patterns.
Meanwhile she and Alex were also dealing with the authorities on the Haakon-Fritz case—which looked likely to put the Practical Darwinists out of business, at least with the general public—and the Institute in regards to resupply. Tia was determined not to leave port this time without that ethological tagging kit. Alex was tired of dealing with each crisis barehanded.
He demanded a supply of firearms—locked up until authorized if necessary, but he wanted to have something to enforce his decisions or to defend himself and others.
"What if Haakon-Fritz had gone berserk?" he asked. "What if those canids had been more aggressive?"
Courier Services was agreeable, but the Institute was fighting him; their long-time policy of absolute pacifism was in direct conflict with any such demand. The ban was clear; on any site where there were nearby sophonts with an Iron Age civilization or above—and "nearby" meant on the same continent—absolutely no arms were to be permitted in association with any Institute personnel, not even those under contract. And since the couriers hit at least one dig on every run that came under the ban, they were not allowed any weaponry at any time. Tia backed her brawn, and she was lobbying with CS and the Lab Schools to help. After all, her well-being was partially dependent on his. The Institute, on the other hand, was balking because there were those who would take the presence of even small arms on board the courier in the worst possible interpretation.
Tia could see their point—but Institute couriers were the only ones not carrying some kind of hand weaponry. They were likely at any time to run into smugglers, who absolutely would be armed. If CS made a ruling on the subject, there would be no way the Institute could get around it.
Meanwhile, on the subject of Haakon-Fritz, things were definitely heating up. The recordings of his Olympic sprint to shelter had somehow gotten leaked to the media—fortunately, long after Tia had locked down her copies—along with the following recording of Alex's heroic dash to the rescue via grav-sled. Alex was a minor celebrity for a day—but he successfully avoided the media, and they soon grew tired of his self-deprecating attitude, and his refusal to make himself photogenic. Haakon-Fritz did not avoid the media, he sought them out—and he became everyone's favorite villain. The Institute could not keep the incident quiet. The Practical Darwinists came to their proponent's rescue, and only made things worse with their public statements of support and their rhetoric. People did not care to hear that they were weaklings, failures, and ought to be done away with for the good of the race. It began to look as if there was going to be a public trial, no matter how hard the Institute tried to avoid one.
It was on the eve of that trial that Tia finally found her next investment project.
In the Azteca system, the third planet—predictably Terran—known as Quetzecoatl.
Interstellar Teleson, one of the major communications firms in their quadrant with cross-contracts and reciprocal agreements across known space, had just relocated their sector corporate headquarters on Quetzecoatl. The location had a great deal to be said for it—central, in the middle of a stable continental plate, good climate. That, however, was not why they had relocated there.
It was one of those secretly negotiated High Family contracts, and Tia had no doubt that there was a lot more at stake than just the area. Someone owed someone else a favor—or else someone wanted something else kept quiet, and this was the price.
She was doubly sure when the location came up red-flagged on her geological search. According to the survey records, that lovely, flat plain was a flood basin. Quetzecoatl did not have the kind of eccentric orbit that Largo Draconis did—just a little tilt. One that didn't affect anyone in the major settlements at all. But once every hundred years, that tilt angled the north pole into the solar plane for a bit longer than usual. The glaciers would start to melt. The plain below wouldn't exactly "flood"—or at least, not all at once. It would just get very, very soggy, slowly—then, when the spring rains came, the water would rise over the course of a week or two. Eventually the entire plain would be under about two inches of water, and would remain that way for about three years, gradually drying again for the fourth as the glaciers in the north grew.
But Interstellar Teleson's Corporate Standards dictated that the most sensitive records and delicate instruments, and all their computer equipment, be installed permanently in sub-basements no less than four stories below surface level, to avoid any possibility of damage. Corporate Standards had been set to guard against human interference, not nature's. Corporate Standards evidently did not consider nature to be important.
Whoever was in charge of this project apparently completely disregarded the geological survey. Engineers complained about seepage and warned of flooding; the reaction was to order extra sump pumps. Sump pumps were keeping the sub-basements tolerably dry now, but Tia guessed that they were going constantly just to keep up with ordinary ground water. They were not going to handle the flood.
Especially not when flood waters were seeping in through the ground floor walls and creeping over the doorsills.
According to the meteorological data, the glaciers were melting, and the spring rains were only a couple of months away.
Meanwhile, half a continent away, there was a disaster recovery firm that specialized in data and equipment recovery. They advertised that they could duplicate an existing system in a month, and recover data from devices that had been immersed in saltwater for over a year, or through major fires with extensive smoke damage. Interstellar Teleson was going to need them, and they didn't even know it. Besides, Tia liked the name. Whoever these people were, they had one heck of a sense of humor.
Chuckling to herself, Tia called Lee Stirling and made her investment—then sent out another carefully worded letter to Crash and Burn Data Recovery, Limited.
The public trial of Doctor Haakon-Fritz was a ten-day circus—but by then, Tia and Alex had far more serious things on their minds and no time to waste on trivialities.
Tia's recordings—both at the site and in the main cabin—were a matter of public record now, and that was the only stake they had in the trial. The Institute only wanted to keep from looking too foolish. In return for the supply of small arms Alex demanded, they asked that he not testify at the trial, since anything he could say would only corroborate those records. They both knew what the Institute people were thinking: records were one thing, but a heroic participant, who just might sound impassioned—no, that was something they didn't want to see. He was willing—he reckoned it was a small price to pay. Besides, there was little he could add, other than becoming another source of media attention.
So while the media gathered, the quiet Institute lawyers and spokesmen tried to downplay the entire incident, Alex got his arms-locker, and Tia her ethological kit as the price for their non-participation. And as they prepared to head out on a new round of duties, there came an urgent message.
The Institute contract was on hold; CS had another use for them as the only BB ship on base.
And they suddenly found themselves, not only with a new agenda—but an entirely new employer.
"Kenny, what is all this about?" Tia asked, when the barrage of orders and follow-up orders concluded, leaving them with a single destination, an empty flight plan, and a "wait for briefing" message. So here they were, docked with the Pride of Albion, and the briefing was coming from Doctor Kennet Uhua-Sorg.
"This," Doctor Kennet replied, grimly, sending the live-cam view of one of the isolation rooms.
Alex gasped. Tia didn't blame him.
The view that Doctor Kennet gave them of this, the Pride of Albion's newest isolation patient, was blessedly brief. It had been a human at one point. Now it was a humanoid-shaped mass of suffering. Somewhere in the mass of open sores were eyes, a mouth, a face. Those had been hands, once—and feet.
Tia was the first to recover. "Who is that," she asked sharply, "and what happened to him?"
"Who—we don't know," Kenny replied, his face completely without expression. "He was from a tramp freighter that left him when he didn't get aboard by lift-off time. We don't know if they expected something like this, or if they were just worried because one of their bogus crew turned up missing, but they burned out of Yamahatchi Station with a speed that simply didn't match their rather shabby exterior. He was under false papers, of course—and there isn't enough of his fingers or retinas left to identify him. And unless he's ever been a murder or crime-of-violence suspect, his DNA patterns could take years to match with his birth-records."
Alex nodded. It wouldn't have been too difficult to deduce his ship; anyone logging into a station hostel or hotel had to list his ship-of-origin as well as filing his papers. That information was instantly cross-checked with the ship; the ship had to okay the crewman's ID before he would be allowed to check in. Passengers, of course, used an entirely separate set of hotels.
"That kind of speed probably means a pirate or a smuggler," Alex said.
"I don't think there's much doubt of that," Kenny replied. "Well, when his logged time at the cheap hostel he'd checked into ran out, they opened the door to his room—found that—and very wisely slammed the door and reported him."
"What about the hostel personnel?" Tia asked.
"We have them all in isolation, but so far, thank the deity of your choice, none of them are showing any signs of infection."
"For which favor, much thanks," Alex muttered.
"Just what is it that he's got?" Tia asked, keeping her voice even and level.
Kenny shrugged. "Another plague with no name. Symptoms are simple enough. Boils which become suppurating sores that seem to heal only to break open again. A complex of viruses and bacteria, reinforced with modified immune deficiency syndrome. So far, no cure. Decontamination sterilized the hostel room completely, and we haven't seen anyone else come down with this thing. And, thank the spirits of space, once he checked into the hostel, door records show he never left his room."
"There is no reason for a pirate to come down with something like that," Tia pointed out, "but an artifact smuggler—"
"Precisely why I asked for you two," Kenny replied, "and precisely why the Institute loaned you to us. Oh, Alex, in case you wondered, I'm in this because, despite my specialty, I seem to have become the expert in diseases associated with archeology."
Alex cast an inquiring glance at her column. Tia knew what he was asking. Could this be the same disease their mysterious "Sinor" had told them about? Could it be that the man had given them a true story, though not his true name?
She printed her answer under Dr. Kenny's image. It's a coincidence. Not the same as Sinor's phony plague—he would have been frantic if he truly had this to contend with.
He signaled his question with his eyes. Why?
Immune deficiency. Contact or airborne. Think about it.
His eyes widened, and he nodded, slowly. The nightmare that had haunted the human world since the twentieth century; the specter of an immune deficiency disease communicated by an airborne or simple-contact vector. No one wanted to think about it, yet in the minds of anyone connected to the medical professions, it was an ever-present threat.
"You two are a unique combination that I think has the best chance to track this thing to its source," Kenny said. "Medical Services will have more than one team on this—but you're the only BB team available. The Institute doesn't want any of their people to stumble on the plague the hard way, so they subcontracted you to Medical for the duration. I'm delegating the planning of search patterns to you. Got any ideas on how to start?"
"Right," Alex replied. "Then if that's what you want, let's do this the smart way, instead of the hard way. First off, what's the odds this could have come off a derelict—station or ship—out in hard vacuum?"
"Odds? Not likely. Hard vacuum kills all of the bugs involved. That does eliminate anything like an asteroid or EsKay situation though, doesn't it?" Kenny looked fairly surprised, as well as pleased. "Let me get Lars in on this, he's been monitoring the poor devil."
It took a few moments for Lars to clear his boards enough to have attention to devote to a vocal circuit. During that time, Tia thought of a few questions she'd like to ask.
"Lars, has he said anything?" she asked, as soon as Lars joined the conference call. "Something that could give us clues?"
"Ravings mostly—do you think you can get anything out of that?" Lars sounded fairly dubious. "It's not as if he was an astrogator or anything. Mostly he's been yammering on about the weather, besides the usual; either pain and hallucinations, or about treasure and gold."
"The weather?" Tia responded immediately. "What about it?"
"Here, I'll give you what I've got—cleaned up so you can understand it, of course."
A new voice came over the circuit; harsh, with a guttural accent. "Treasure . . . gold . . . never saw s'much. Piles'n'piles . . . no moon, frag it, how c'n a guy see anythin' . . . anythin' out there. No moon. Dark 's a wormhole. Crazy weather. Nothin' but crazy weather . . . snow, rain, snow, sleet, mud—how ya s'pposed t' dig this stuff up in this?"
"That's basically it," Lars said, cutting the recording off. "He talks about treasure, moonless, dark nights, and crazy weather."
"Why not assume he's complaining about where he was? Put that together with an atmosphere and—?" Tia prompted. "What do you get?"
"Right. Possible eccentric orbit, probably extreme tilt, third-in Terra-type position, and no satellites." Lars sounded pleased. "I'll get Survey on it."
"What about the likely range of the ship that left him?" Tia asked. "Check with CenSec and Military; the docks at Yamahatchi had to have external specs and so forth on that ship. What kind of fuel did they take on, if any? Docks should have external pictures. Military ought to be able to guess at the range, based on that. That should give us a search area."
"Good." Kenny made notes. "I've got another range—how long it probably took for our victim to come down with the disease once he was infected. Combine that one with yours, and we should have a sphere around Yamahatchi."
"Kenny, he couldn't possibly have shown any symptoms while he was in space—they'd have pitched him out the airlock," Tia pointed out. "That means he probably went through incubation while they were in FTL and only showed symptoms once they hit port."
"Right. I'll have that calculated for you and get you the survey records for that sphere, then it'll be up to you and the other teams." Kenny signed off, and Alex swiveled his chair to face Tia's column.
"There's an information lag for that area," Alex pointed out. "Yamahatchi is on the edge of known space. Survey is still working out there—except for really critical stuff, it's going to take weeks, months, even years for information to make it here. We need a search net, not just a couple of search teams."
"So—how about if we have Kenny call in not just Medical Services, but Decontamination?" she asked. "They don't have any BB teams either, but they do have the AI drones and the med teams assigned to them. They can run the net as well as we can. Slower, but that may not be so bad."
"I'll get on it," Alex replied instantly. "He can be mobilizing every free ship and team they've got while we compute the likely targets."
"And Intelligence!" she added, as Alex got back on the horn with Kenny and his team. "Get Kenny to get in touch with Intel, and have their people inside that sphere be on the watch for more victims, rumors of plague or of plague ships, or ships that have mysteriously lost half their crews!"
That would effectively increase their available eyes and ears a hundred-thousandfold.
"Or of ships that vanish and don't come into port," Alex said grimly. "Somewhere along the line that so-called tramp freighter is going to do just that; go into hyper and never come out again. Or come out and drift with no hand on the helm."
Tia wished she could still shiver; as it was, she felt rather as if her hull temperature had just dropped to absolute zero.
No computer could match the trained mind for being able to identify or discard a prospect with no data other than the basic survey records. Alex and Tia each took cone-shaped segments of the calculated sphere and began running their own kind of analysis on the prospects the computer search came up with.
Some were obvious; geologic instability that would uncover or completely bury the caches unpredictably. Weather that did not include snow, weather that did not include rain. Occupied planets with relatively thick settlements, or planets with no continents, only tiny island chains.
Some were not so obvious. Terrain with no real landmarks or landmarks subject to change. Terrain with snow and rain, but with snow piling up twelve feet thick in the winter; too deep to dig in. The original trove must have been uncovered by accident—perhaps during the construction of a rudimentary base—or by someone just outside, kicking around dirt.
Places with freelance mining operations were on the list; agri-colonies weren't. Places marked by the Institute for investigation were, places with full Institute teams weren't. While Tia would not have put it past someone with problems to sell out to smugglers, she didn't think that they'd care to cover up a contagious disease this hideous.
As soon as they finished mapping a cone, it went out to a team to cover. They had another plan in mind for themselves: covering free-trade ports, looking for another victim. They could cover the ports a lot faster than any of the AI or softperson-piloted ships; the only one faster would have been someone with a Singularity Drive. Since those were all fully occupied—and since, as yet, they had only one victim and not a full-scale plague in progress—there was no chance of getting one reassigned to this duty. So AH One-Oh-Three-Three would be doing what it could—and trying to backtrack the "freighter" to its origin point.
They were running against the clock, and everyone on the project knew it. If this disease got loose in a large, space-going population, the chances of checking it before millions died were slender.
"Alex," Tia called for the third time, raising the volume of her voice a little more. This time he answered, even though he didn't turn his dark-circled eyes away from his work.
"What, m'love?" he said absently, his gaze glued to a topographical map on the screen before him, despite the fact that he could hardly keep his eyes open.
She overrode the screen controls, blanking the one in front of him. He blinked and turned to stare at her with weary accusation.
"Why did you do that?" he asked. "I was right in the middle of studying the geography—"
"Alex!" she said with exasperation. "You hadn't changed the screen in half an hour; you probably hadn't really looked at it in all that time. Alex, you haven't eaten anything in over six hours, you haven't slept in twenty, and you haven't bathed or changed your clothes in forty-eight!"
He rubbed his eyes and peered up at the blank screen. "I'm fine," he protested feebly.
"You're not," she countered. "You can hardly hold your head up. Look at your hand shake! Coffee is no substitute for sleep!"
He clenched his fist to stop the trembling of his hand. "I'm fine," he repeated, stubbornly.
She made a rude noise and flashed her screens at him, so that he winced. "There, see? You can't even control your reactions. If you don't eat, you'll get sick, if you don't sleep, you'll miss something vital, and if you don't bathe and change your clothes I'm turning you over to Decontam."
"All right, love, all right," he sighed, reaching over and patting her column. "Heat me up something; I'll be in the galley shortly."
"How shortly?" she asked sharply.
"As long as it takes for a shower and fresh clothes." He pried himself up out of his chair and stumbled for his room. A moment later, she heard the shower running—and when she surreptitiously checked, she discovered that as she had suspected, he was running it on cold.
Trying to wake up, hmm? Not when I want you to relax. She overrode the controls—not bringing it all the way up to blood-heat, but enough that he wasn't standing in something one degree above sleet. It must have worked; when he stumbled out into the galley, freshly clothed, he was yawning.
She fed him food laden with tryptophane; he was too tired to notice. And even though he punched for it, he got no coffee, only relaxing herbal teas.
He patted her auxiliary console—this time as if he were patting someone's hand to get her attention. He'd been doing that a lot, lately—that and touching her column like the arm of an old and dear friend. "Tia, love, don't you realize we're almost through with this? Two cones to go—three if you count the one I'm working on now—"
"Which I can finish," she said firmly. "I don't need to eat, and I only need three hours of DeepSleep in twenty-four. Yes, I knew. But you aren't going to get teams out there any faster by killing yourself—and if you work yourself until you're exhausted, you are going to miss what might be the important clue."
"But—" he protested, and was stopped by a yawn.
"No objections," she replied. "I can withhold the data, and I will. No more data for another eight hours. Consider the boards locked, brawn. I'm overriding you, and if I have to, I'll get Medical to second me."
He was too tired to be angry, too tired even to object. In the past several days he had averaged about four hours in each sleep period, with nervous energy waking him long before he should have reawakened. But the strain was taking its toll. She had the feeling he was going to get that eight solid hours this time, whether or not he intended to.
"You aren't going to accomplish anything half-conscious," she reminded him. "You know what they say in the Academy; do it right, or don't do it."
"I give up." He threw his hands up in the air and shook his head. "You're too much for me, lover."
And with that, he wandered back into his cabin and fell onto his bunk, still fully clothed. He was asleep the moment he was prone.
She did something she had never done before; she continued to watch him through her eye in his cabin, brooding over him, trying to understand what had been happening over the past several days.
She had forgotten that she was encased in a column, not once, but for hours at a time. They had talked and acted like—like ordinary people, not like brain and brawn. Somehow, during that time, the unspoken, unconscious barriers between them had disappeared.
And he had called her "love" or "lover" no less than three times in the past ten minutes. He'd been calling her by that particular pet name quite a bit
He had been patting her console or column quite a bit, these past few days—as if he were touching someone's hand to gain attention, soothe, or emphasize a point.
She didn't think he realized that he was doing either of those things. It seemed very absentminded, and very natural. So she wasn't certain what to make or think of it all. It could simply be healthy affection; some people used pet names very casually. Up until now, Alex hadn't, but perhaps until now he hadn't felt comfortable enough with her to do so. How long had they known each other anyway? Certainly not more than a few months—even though it felt like a lifetime.
No, she told herself firmly. It doesn't mean a thing. He's just finally gotten to know me well enough to bring all his barriers down.
But the sooner they completed their searches and got out into space again, the sooner things would go back to normal.
Let's see if I can't do two of those three cones before he wakes up. . . .
Predictably, the port that the mysterious tramp freighter had filed as its next port of call did not have any record of it showing up. Tia hadn't really expected it to; these tramps were subject to extreme changes of flight plan, and if it had been a smuggler, it certainly wouldn't log where it expected to go next.
She just hoped that it had failed to show up because the captain had lied—and not because they were drifting out in space somewhere. She let Alex do all the talking; he was developing a remarkable facility for playing a part and very cleverly managed to tell the absolute truth while conveying an impression that was entirely different from the whole truth.
In this case, he left the station manager with the impression that he was an agent for a collection agency—one that meant to collect the entire ship, once he caught up with it
Alex shut down the com to the station manager, and turned his chair to face her screen and the plots of available destinations.
"How do you do that?" she asked, finally. "How do you make them think something entirely different from the real truth?"
He laughed, while she pulled up the local map and projected it as a holographic image. "I've been in theater groups for as long as I can remember, once I got into school. My other hobby, the one I never took too seriously, even though they said I was pretty good. I just try to imagine myself as the person I want to be, and figure out what of the truth fits that image."
"Well," she said, as they studied the ship's possible destinations, "if I were a smuggler, where would I go?"
"Lermontov Station, Presley Station, Korngold Station, Tung Station," he said, ticking them off on his fingers. "They might turn up elsewhere, but the rest all have Intel people on them; we'll know if they hit there."
"Provided whoever Intel has posted there is worth his paycheck. Why Presley Station?" she asked. "That's just an asteroid-mining company headquarters."
"High Family in residence," he replied, leaning back in his chair, and lacing his fingers behind his head. "Money for valuable artifacts. Miners with money—and not all of them are rock-rats."
"I thought miners were all—well, fairly crude," she replied.
He shook his head. "Miners are people, and there are all kinds out there. There are plenty of miners looking to make a stake—and some of them outfit their little tugs in ways that make a High Family yacht look plain. They have money for pretties, and they don't much care where the pretty came from. And one more thing; the Presley-Lee y Black consortium will buy ore hauls from anyone, including tramp prospectors, so we have a chance that someone may actually stumble on the trove itself. We can post a reward notice there, and it'll be seen."
"Along with a danger warning," she told him. "I only hope these people believe it. Lermontov first, then Tung, then Presley?"
"Your call, love," he replied comfortably, sending a carefully worded notice to the station newsgrid. They didn't want to cause a panic, but they did want people to turn in any clue to the whereabouts of the freighter. And they didn't want anyone infected along the way. So the news notice said that the ship in question might have been contaminated with Anthrax Three, a serious, but not fatal, variant of old Terran anthrax.
He finished posting his notice, and turned back to her. "You're the pilot. I'm just along for the ride."
"It's the most efficient vector," she replied, logging her flight plan with Traffic Control. "Three days to Lermontov, one to Tung, a day and a half to Presley."
Despite Alex's disclaimer that he was only along for the ride, the two of them did not spend the three days to Lermontov idle. Instead, they sifted through all the reports they'd gotten so far from the other teams, looking for clues or hints that their mystery ship could have made port anywhere else. Then, when they hit Lermontov, Alex went hunting on-station.
This time his cover was as a shady artifact dealer; looking for entire consignments on the cheap. There were plenty of people like him, traders with negotiable ethics, who would buy up a lot of inexpensive artifacts and forge papers for them, selling them on the open market to middle-class collectors who wanted to have something to impress their friends and bosses with their taste and education. Major pirates wouldn't deal with them—at least, not for the really valuable things. But crewmen, who might pick up a load of pottery or something else not worth the bigger men's time, would be only too happy to see him. In this case, it was fortunate that Tia's hull was that of an older model without a Singularity Drive; she looked completely nondescript and a little shabby, just the sort of thing such a man would lease for a trip to the Fringe.
Lermontov was a typical station for tramp freighters and ships of dubious registration. Not precisely a pirate station, since it was near a Singularity, it still had station managers who looked the other way when certain kinds of ships made port, docks that accepted cash in advance and didn't inquire too closely into papers, and a series of bars and restaurants where deals could be made with no fear of recording devices.
That was where Alex went—wearing one of his neon outfits. Tia was terrified that he would be recognized for what he was, but there was nothing she could do about it. He couldn't even wear a contact-button; the anti-surveillance equipment in every one of those dives would short it out as soon as he crossed the threshold. She could only monitor the station newsgrids, look for more clues about "their" ship, and hope his acting ability was as good as he thought it was.
Alex had learned the trick of drinking with someone when you wanted to stay sober a long time ago. All it took was a little sleight of hand. You let the quarry drain his drink, switch his with yours, and let him drain the second, then call for another round. After three rounds, he wouldn't even notice you weren't drinking, particularly not when you were buying the drinks.
Thank the spirits of space for a MedService credit account.
He started out in the "Pink Comet," whose neon decorations more than outmatched his jumpsuit. He learned quickly enough there that the commodities he wanted weren't being offered—although the rebuff was friendly enough, coming from the bartender after he had already stood the whole house a round. In fact, the commodities being offered were more in the line of quasi-legal services, rather than goods. The bartender didn't know who might have what he wanted—but he knew who would know and sent Alex on to the "Rimrunners."
Several rounds later, he suffered through a comical interlude where he encountered someone who thought he was buying feelie-porn and sex-droids, and another with an old rock-rat who insisted that what he wanted was not artifacts but primitive art. "There's no money in them arty-facts no more," the old boy insisted, banging the table with a gnarled fist. "Them accountants don't want arty-facts, the damn market's got glutted with 'em! I'm tellin' ya—primy-tive art is the next thing!"
It took Alex getting the old sot drunk to extract himself from the man—which might have been what the rock-rat intended in the first place. By then he discovered that the place he really wanted to be was the "Rockwall."
In the "Rockwall" he hit paydirt, all right—but not precisely what he had been looking for.
The bar had an odd sort of quiet ambience; a no-nonsense non-human bartender, an unobtrusive bouncer who outweighed Alex by half again his own weight, and a series of little enclosed table-nooks where the acoustics were such that no sound escaped the table area. Lighting was subdued, the place was immaculately clean, the prices not outrageously inflated. Whatever deals went on here, they were discrete.
Alex made it known to the bartender what he was looking for and took a seat at one of the tables. In short order, his credit account had paid for a gross of Betan funeral urns, twenty soapstone figurines of Rg'kedan snake-goddesses, three exquisite little crystal Kanathi skulls that were probably worth enough that the Institute and Medical would forgive him anything else he bought, and—of all bizarre things to see out here—a Hopi kachina figure of Owl Dancer from old Terra herself. The latter was probably stolen from another crewman; Alex made a promise to himself to find the owner and get it back to him—or her. It was not an artifact as such, but it might well represent a precious bit of tribal heritage to someone who was so far from home and tribe that the loss of this kachina could be a devastating blow.
His credit account had paid for these things—but those he did business with were paid in cash. Simply enough done, as he discovered at the first transaction. The seller ordered a "Rock'n'Run"—the bartender came to the table with a cashbox. Alex signed a credit chit for the amount of sale plus ten percent to the bar; the bartender paid the seller. Everyone was happy.
He'd spoken with several more crewmen of various odd ships, prompting, without seeming to, replies concerning rumors of disease or of plague ships. He got old stories he'd heard before, the Betan Dutchman, the Homecoming, the Alice Bee. All ships and tales from previous decades; nothing new.
He stayed until closing, making the bartender stretch his "lips" in a cheerful "smile" at the size of the bills he was paying—and making the wait-beings argue over who got to serve him next with the size of his tips. He had remembered what Jon Chernov had told him once about Intel people: They have to account for every half-credit they spend, so they're as tightfisted as a corporate accountant at tax time. If you're ever doing Intel work, be a big spender. They'll never suspect you. And better a docked paycheck for overspending than a last look at the business end of a needler.
Just before closing was when the Quiet Man came in. As unobtrusive as they came, Alex didn't realize the man was in the bar until he caught a glimpse of him talking with the bartender. And he didn't realize that he was coming towards Alex's table until he was standing there.
"I understand you're buying things," the Quiet Man breathed. "I have some—things."
He opened his hand, briefly, to display a miniature vase or bottle, a lovely thing with a rainbow sheen and a style that seemed oddly familiar, although Alex couldn't place it. As if one had fused Art Nouveau with Salvadore Dali, it had a skewed but fascinating sinuosity.
"That's the sort of merchandise I'm interested in, all right," Alex said agreeably, as he racked his brain, trying to place where he had seen a piece like it before. "The trouble is, it looks a little expensive for my pocket."
The Quiet Man slid in opposite Alex at a nod. "Not as expensive as you think," the Quiet Man replied. "The local market's glutted with this stuff." The Quiet Man's exterior matched his speech; gray jumpsuit, pale skin, colorless eyes and hair, features that were utterly average. "I have about a hundred little pieces like this and I haven't been able to unload them, and that's a fact."
"I appreciate your honesty," Alex told him, allowing his surprise to show through.
The Quiet Man shrugged. "You'd find it out sooner or later. The bosses only wanted the big stuff. Some of the other guys took jewelry; I thought they were crazy, since it was only titanium, and the pieces weren't comfortable to wear and a little flimsy. But some of the earlier crews must have brought back these perfume bottles, because I haven't been able to dump even one. I was hoping if you were buying for another sector, you'd be interested. I can give you a good deal on the lot."
"What kind of a good deal?" Alex asked.
The Quiet Man told him, and they began their bargaining. They ended it a good half hour after the bar was officially closed, but since Alex was willingly paying liquor prices for fruit juice—all that was legal after-hours—the bartender was happy to have him there. The staff cleaned up around them, until he and the Quiet Man shook hands on the deal.
"These aren't exactly ancient artifacts," the Quiet Man had admitted under pressure from Alex. "They can be doctored to look like 'em with a little acid-bath, though. They're—oh—maybe eight, nine hundred years old. Come from a place colonized by one of the real early human slowships; colony did all right for a while, then got religion and had themselves a religious war, wiped each other out until there wasn't enough to be self-sustaining. We figured the last of them died out maybe two hundred years ago. Religion. Go figure."
Alex eyed his new acquisition with some surprise. "This's human-made? Doesn't look it!"
The Quiet Man shrugged. "Beats me. Bosses said the colonists were some kind of artsy-craftsy back-to-nature types. Had this kind of offshoot of an earth-religion with sacramental hallucinogenics thrown in to make it interesting, until somebody decided he was the next great prophet and half the colony didn't see it that way. I mean, who knows with that kind? Crazies."
"Well, I can make something up that sounds pretty exotic," Alex said cheerfully. "My clients won't give a damn. So, what do you want to do about delivery?"
"You hire a lifter and a kid from SpaceCaps," the Quiet Man said instantly. "I'll do the same. They meet here, tomorrow, at twelve-hundred. Your kid gives mine the credit slip, mine gives yours the box. Make the slip out to the bar, the usual."
Since that was exactly the kind of arrangement Alex had made for the gross of funeral urns, with only the time of delivery differing, he agreed, and he and the Quiet Man left the bar and went their separate ways.
When he returned to the ship, he took the stairs instead of the lift, still trying to remember where he had seen the style of the tiny vase.
"You look cheerful!" Tia said, relief at his safe return quite evident in her voice.
"I feel cheerful. I picked up some artifacts on the black market that I'm sure the Institute will be happy to have." He emptied his pockets of everything but the "perfume bottle" and laid out his "loot" where Tia could use her close-up cameras on the objects. "And this, I suspect, is stolen—" He unwrapped the kachina. "See if you can find the owner, will you?"
"No problem," she replied absently. "I've been following your credit chit all over the station; that's how I figured out how to keep track of you. Alex, the two end skulls are forgeries, but the middle one is real, and worth as much as everything you spent tonight."
"Glad to hear it." He chuckled. "I wasn't sure what I was going to say to the Institute and Medical if they found out I'd been overtipping and buying rounds for the house! All right, here's my final find, and I have a load of them coming over tomorrow. Do you remember what the devil this is?"
He placed the warped little vase carefully on the console. Tia made a strange little inarticulate gargle.
"Alex!" she exclaimed. "That's one of SWOT's artifacts!"
He slapped his forehead with the heel of his hand. "Of course! That's why I couldn't remember what book I'd seen it in! Spirits of space—Tia, I just made a deal with the crewman of the ship that's running these things in for a whole load of them! He said—and I quote—'the bosses only wanted the bigger stuff.' They're not really artifacts, they're from some failed human art-religious colony."
"I'm calling the contact number Sinor gave us," she said firmly. "Keep your explanations until I get someone on the line."
Tia had been ready to start sending her servos to pick lint out of the carpet with sheer nerves until she figured out that she could trace Alex's whereabouts by watching for his credit number in the station database. She followed him to three different bars that way, winding up in one called "Rockwall," where he settled down and began spending steadily. She called up the drink prices there, and soon knew when he had made an actual artifact purchase by the simple expedient of which numbers didn't match some combination of the drink prices. A couple of times the buys were obvious; no amount of drinking was going to run up numbers like he'd just logged to his expense account.
She had worried a little when he didn't start back as soon as the bar closed—but drinks kept getting logged in, and she figured then, with a little shiver of anticipation, that he must have gotten onto a hot deal.
When he returned, humming a little under his breath, she knew he'd hit paydirt of some kind.
The artifacts he'd bought were enough to pacify the Institute—but when he brought out the little vase, she thought her circuits were going to fry.
The thing's identification was so obvious to her that she couldn't believe at first that he hadn't made the connection himself. But then she remembered how fallible softperson memory was. . . .
Well, it didn't matter. That was one of the things she was here for, after all. She grabbed a com circuit and coded out the contact number Sinor had given her, hoping it was something without too much of a lag time.
She could not be certain where her message went to—but she got an answer so quickly that she suspected it had to come from someone in the same real-space as Lermontov. No visual coming through to them, of course—which, if she still had been entertaining the notion that this was really an Institute directive they were following, would have severely shaken her convictions. But knowing it was probably the Drug Enforcement Arm—she played along with the polite fiction that the visual circuit on their end was malfunctioning, and let Alex repeat the details of the deal he had cut, as she offered only a close-up of the little vase.
"Go through with it," their contact said, when Alex was done. "You've done excellent work, and you'll be getting that bonus. Go ahead and receive the consignment; we'll take care of the rest and clear out the debits on that account for you. And don't worry; they'll never know you weren't an ordinary buyer."
There was no mention of plague or any suggestions that they should take precautions against contamination. Alex gave her a significant look.
"Very well, sir," he only said, with careful formality. "I hope we've accomplished something here for you."
"You have," the unknown said, and then signed off.
Alex picked up the little vase and turned it around and around in his hands as he sat down in his chair and put his feet up on the console. Tia made the arrangements for the two messengers to come to the ship for the credit chits and then to the bar for the pickups—fortunately, not at the same time. That didn't take more than a moment or two, and she turned her attention back to Alex as soon as she was done.
"Was that stupid, dumb luck, coincidence, or were we set up?" she asked suspiciously. "And where was that agent? It sounded like he was in our back pocket!"
"I'm going to make some guesses," Alex said, carefully. "The first guess is that we did run into some plain good luck. The Quiet Man had tried all the approved outlets for his trinkets—outlets that the Arm doesn't know about—and found them glutted. He was desperate enough to try someone like me. I suspect his ship pulls out tomorrow or the next day."
"Fine—but why go ahead and sell to you if he didn't know you?" Tia asked.
"Because I was in the right bar, making all the right moves, and I didn't act like the Arm or Intel." Alex rubbed his thumb against the sides of the vase. "I was willing to go through the barkeep to pay, which I don't think Intel would do. I had the right 'feel,' and I suspect he was watching to see if any of his buddies got picked up after they sold to me. And lastly, once again, we were lucky. Because he doesn't know what his bosses are using the phony artifacts for. He thought the worst that could happen is a wrist-slap and fine, for importing art objects without paying customs duty on them."
"Maybe his bosses aren't using the artifacts for smuggling," she pointed out, thinking out all the possibilities. "Maybe they are just passing them on to a second party."
"In this station, that's very possible." Alex put the vase down carefully. "At any rate, I think the Arm suspected this cluster of stations all along, and they've got a ship out here somewhere—which is why we got an answer so quickly. I thought that was a ship-contact number when I saw it, but I didn't say anything."
"Hmm." Tia ran through all the things she would have done next and came up with a possible answer. "So now they just find the messenger that goes to 'Rockwall' at noon from a ship that isn't ours, and tags the ship for watching? Or is that too simple?"
Alex yawned and stretched. "Probably," he said, plainly bored with the whole game now. "He probably won't send the messenger from his ship. They'll do their spy-work somehow; we just gave them what they didn't have in the first place, a contact point. It's out of our hands, which is just as well, since I'd rather not get involved in a smuggler versus Intel shoot-out. I'm tired."
"Then you should get some rest," she said immediately. "And get that jumpsuit out of my cabin before it burns out my optics."
He laughed—but he also headed straight for his bed.
Tia didn't even bother to wake her brawn as she approached Presley Station and hailed their traffic control. She expected the usual automated AI most mining stations had; she got a human. Although it was audio-only, there was no doubt that this was a real human being and not an AI-augmented recording.
Because, from the strain in the voice, it was a very nervous and unhappy human.
"AH-One-Oh-Three-Three, be advised we are under a Code Five quarantine," the com officer said, with the kind of hesitation that made her think he wasn't on a microphone very often. "We can let you dock, and we can refuel you with servos, but we can't permit you to open your airlock. And we'd like you to move on to some other station if you have the reserves."
He can't deny us docking under a Code Five, but he's frightened. And he really wants us to go away.
Tia made a quick command decision. "Presley Station, be advised that we are on assignment from CenCom Medical. References coming now." She sent over her credentials in a databurst. "We're coming in, and we'd appreciate Presley Station's cooperation. We'd like to be connected to your Chief Medical Officer while we maneuver for docking, please."
"Uh—I—" There was a brief muttering, as if he was speaking to someone else, then he came back on the mike. "We can do that. Stand by for docking instructions."
At that point the human left the com, and the AI took over; she woke up Alex and briefed him, then gave him a chance to get dressed and gulp some coffee while she dealt with the no longer routine business of docking. As she followed the AI's fairly simple instructions, she wondered just what, exactly, was going on at Presley Station.
Was this the start of the plague, or a false alarm?
Or—was this just one outbreak among many?
She waited, impatiently, for the com officer to return online, while Alex gulped down three cups of coffee and shook himself out of the fog of interrupted sleep. It took forever, or at least it seemed that way.
Finally the com came alive again. "AH-One-Oh-Three-Three, we have the Chief Medical Officer online for you now." It was a different voice; one with more authority. Before Tia could respond, both voice and visual channels came alive, and she and Alex found themselves looking into the face of a seriously frightened man, a man wearing medical whites and the insignia of a private physician.
"Hello?" the man said, tentatively. "You—you're from MedServices? You don't look like a doctor."
"I'm not a doctor," Alex said promptly. "I've been authorized by CenCom MedServices to investigate a possible outbreak of a new infectious disease that involves immune deficiency syndrome. We had reason to believe that there's an infectious site somewhere in this sphere, and we've been trying to track the path of the last known victim."
There was no doubt about it; the doctor paled. "Let me show you our patient," he whispered, and reached for something below the screen. A second signal came in, which Tia routed to her side screen.
The patient displayed suppurating boils virtually identical to Kenny's victim; the only difference was that this man was not nearly so far gone as the first one.
"Well, he matches the symptoms of the victim we've been tracking," Alex said, calmly, while Tia made frantic adjustments to her blood-chemistry levels to get her heart calmed down. "I trust you have him in full isolation and quarantine."
"Him and his ship," the doctor replied, visibly shaking. "We haven't had any new cases, but decom it, we don't know what this is or what the vector is or—"
"I've got a contact number coming over to you right now," Alex interrupted, typing quickly. "As soon as you get off the line with me, get onto this line; it's a double-bounce link up to MedServices and a Doctor Kennet Uhua-Sorg. He's the man in charge of this; he has the first case in his custody, and he'll know whatever there is to know. What we'd like is this; we're the team in charge of tracking this thing to its source. Do you know anything about where this patient came from, what he was doing—"
"Not much," the doctor said, already looking relieved at the idea that someone at CenCom was "in charge" of this outbreak. Tia didn't have the heart to let him know how little Kenny knew; she only hoped that since they'd left, he'd come up with something more in the way of a treatment. "He's a tramp prospector; he came in here with a load we sealed off, and sick as a dog—crawled into port under his own power, but he collapsed on the dock as soon as he was out of the ship, yelling for a medic. We didn't know he was sick when we let him dock, of course—"
The man was babbling, or he wouldn't have let that slip. Interstellar law decreed that victims of disease be given safe harborage within quarantine, but Tia had no doubt that if traffic control hadn't been an AI, the prospector would have never gotten a berth. At best, they would have denied him docking privileges; at worst, they'd have sent a fighter out to blast him into noninfectious atoms. She made a mental note to send that information on to Kenny with their initial report.
"—when he collapsed and one of the dockworkers saw the sores, he hit the alarm and we sealed the dock off, sent in a crew in decontam suits to get him and put him into isolation. I sent off a Priority One to our PTA, but it takes so long to get an answer from them—"
"Did he say where he thought he caught this?" Alex said, interrupting him again.
The doctor shook his head. "He just said he was out looking for a good stake when he stumbled across something that looked like an interstellar rummage sale, and he figures that was where he got hit. What he meant by 'interstellar rummage sale' he won't say. Just that it was a lot of 'stuff' he didn't recognize."
Well, that matched their guess as to the last victim.
"Can we talk to him?" Tia asked.
The doctor shrugged. "You can try. I'll give you audiovisual access to the room. He's conscious and coherent, but whether or not he'll be willing to tell you anything, I can't say. He sure won't tell us much."
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—"
" 'Sall 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 somethin' 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 buildings, 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 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 well 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.
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.