Brain Ships

by Anne McCaffrey

  Alex still looked like someone had been interrogating him with rubber hoses, so when the brainship hailed them, she took the call, and let him continue nursing his aching head and bruises.

  The ship-number was awfully close to hers, although the military might not use standard CS brainship nomenclature. Still. . . . One-Oh-Four-One. That's close enough for the brain to have been in my class—

  "Tia, that is you, isn't it?" were the first words over the comlink. The "voice"—along with the sharp overtones and aggressive punch behind them—was very familiar.

  "Pol?" she replied, wondering wildly what the odds were on this little meeting.

  "In the shell and ready to kick some tail!" Pol responded cheerfully. "How the heck are you? Heard you had some trouble out here, and the Higher Ups said 'go,' so we came a-running."

  "Trouble—you could say so." She sent him over her records of the short—but hair-raising, at least by her standards—flight, in a quick burst. He scanned them just as quickly, and sent a wordless blip of color and sound conveying mingled admiration and surprise. If he had been a softie, he would have whistled.

  "Not bad flying, if I do say so myself!" he said. "Like the way you cut right under that tug—maybe you should have opted for CenSec or Military."

  "I don't think so," she replied. "That was more than enough excitement for the next decade for me."

  "Suit yourself." Pol laughed, as if he didn't believe her. "My brawn wants to talk to your brawn. It's debriefing time."

  She called Alex, who had been flat on his back in his bunk with an ice-gel pack on his black eyes. He staggered out to his chair and plopped down into it. For once, she thought, no one was going to notice his rumpled uniform—not with the black-blue-purple and green glory of his bruised face staring out of a screen.

  "Line's open," she told Pol, activating the visual circuit.

  As she had half-expected, given her impressions of the candidates when she had been picking a brawn, it was Chria Chance who stared out of the screen, with surprise written all over her handsome features. She was still wearing her leather uniforms, Tia noticed—which argued powerfully for "Chria" being High Family. Little eccentricities like custom-tailored uniforms could be overlooked in someone who was both a High Family scion and had an excellent record of performance. Tia had no doubt that Chria's record was outstanding.

  Tia noted also one difference between the Courier Service ships and the CenSec Couriers besides the armament. Directly behind Chria was another console and another comchair; this one held a thin, sharp-featured man in a uniform identical to Chria's, with an ornamental leather band or choker circling his long throat. He looked just as barbaric as she did. More, actually. He had the rangy, take-no-prisoners look of someone from one of the outer systems.

  In short, he and Chria probably got along as if they had been made for each other.

  "Frigging novas!" Chria exclaimed, after the first few seconds of staring. "Alex, what in blazes happened to you? Your dispatches never said anything about—did they—"

  "Nobody worked me over, Brunhilde," Alex said tiredly, but with a hint of his customary humor. "So don't get your tights in a knot. This is all my own fault—or maybe just the fault of bad timing. It's the result of my face hitting my chair at—what was that acceleration, Tia?"

  "About two gees," she said apologetically.

  Chria shook her head in disbelief. "Huh. Well, shoot—here I was getting all ready to go on-station and dent some heads to teach these perps some manners." She sat back in her chair and grinned at him. "Sorry about that, flyboy. Next time, strap in."

  "Next time, maybe I'll have some warning," he replied. "Those clowns tried to 'jack us with no advance notice. New regs should require at least twenty-four hours warning before a hijacking. And forms filed in quad."

  Chria laughed. "Right. You two have been making my people very happy, did you know that? Their nickname for you is 'Bird-dog,' because you've been flushing so much game out for us."

  "No doubt." Alex copied her stance, except that where she steepled her hands in front of her chin, he rubbed his temple. "Do I assume that this is not a social call? As in, 'debriefing time'?"

  "Oh, yes and no." She shrugged, but her eyes gleamed. "We don't really need to debrief you, but there's a couple of orders I have to pass. First of all, I've been ordered to tell you that if you've figured out where your rock-rat's treasure trove is, transmit the coordinates to us so we know where you're going, but get on out there as soon as you can move your tail. We'll send a follow-up, but right now we've got some high-level butts to bust here."

  "Generous of you," Alex said dryly. "Letting us go in first and catch whatever flack is waiting. Are we still a 'bird-dog,' or have we been elevated to 'self-propelled trouble magnet'?"

  Chria only laughed.

  "Come on, flyboy, get with the team. There's still a Plague-spot out there, and you're the ones most likely to find it; we don't know what in Tophet we're looking for." She raised an eyebrow at him, and he nodded in grudging agreement. "Then when you find it, you know how to handle it. I kind of gather that your people want the plague stopped, but they also want their statues and what-all kept safe, too. What're Neil and I going to do, shoot the bug down? He's hot on the trigger, but he's not up to potting microbes just yet!"

  Behind her, the sharp-faced man shrugged in self-deprecation and grinned.

  "So, if you've got a probable, let us know so we can keep an eye on you. Otherwise—" she spread her hands "—there's nothing we need you for. Fly free, little birds—the records you so thoughtfully bounced all over the sector are all we need to convict these perps, wrap them up, and stick them where they have to pump in daylight."

  "Here's what we have," Tia said before Alex could respond. She sent Pol duplicates of their best guesses. "As you can see, we have narrowed it down to three really good prospects. Only one of those has a record of sentient ruins, so that's the one we think is the most likely—I wish they'd logged something besides just 'presence of structures,' but there it is."

  "Survey," Pol said succinctly. "Get lots of burnout cases in Survey. Well, what can you expect, going planet-hopping for months on end, dropping satellites, with nothing but an AI to keep you company? Sometimes surprised they don't go buggy, all things considered. I would."

  Pol seemed much more convivial than Tia recalled him ever being, and completely happy with his brawn, and Chria had that relaxed look of a brawn with the perfect partner. But still—Chria had been an odd one, and Military and Central Security didn't let their brainships swap brawns without overwhelming reasons. Was Pol happy?

  "Pol," Tia sent only to him, "did you get a good one?"

  Pol laughed, replying the same way. "The best! I wouldn't trade off Chria or Neil for any combo in the Service. We three-up over here, you know—it's a double-brawn and brain setup; it's a fail-safe because we're armed. Chria's the senior officer, and Neil's the gunnery-mate, but Neil's been studying, and now he can double her on anything. Fully qualified. That's not usually the case, from what I hear."

  "Why didn't he get his own brainship, then?" she asked, puzzled. "If he's fully qualified, shouldn't he get a promotion?"

  "Who can figure softies?" Pol said dismissively. "He and Chria share her cabin. Maybe it's hormonal. How about you—you were saying you planned to be pretty picky about your brawns. Did they rush you, or did you get a good one?"

  There were a hundred things she could have said—many of which could have gotten her in a world of trouble if she answered as enthusiastically as she would have liked. "Oh, Alex will do—when he's not shoving his face into chairs," she replied as lightly as she could. Pol laughed and made a few softie jokes while Alex and Chria tied up all the loose ends that needed to be dealt with.

  They were the only ship permitted to leave Presley space—Chria hadn't been joking when she'd said that there was going to be a thorough examination of everything going on out here. On the other hand, not having to contend with other tra
ffic was rather nice, all things considered.

  Now if only they had a Singularity Drive. . . .

  Never mind, she told herself, as she accelerated to hyper. I can manage without it. I just hope we don't have any more "help" from the opposition.

  * * *

  This place didn't even have a name yet—just a chart designation. Epsilon Delta 177.3.3. Pol had called it right on the nose—whoever had charted this place must have been a burnout case, or he would have at least tried to name it. That was one of the few perks of a Survey mission; most people took advantage of it.

  It certainly had all the earmarks of the kind of place they were looking for; eccentric tilt, heavy cloud cover that spoke of rain or snow or both. But as Tia decelerated into the inner system, she suddenly knew that they had hit paydirt without ever coming close enough to do a surface scan.

  There should have been a Survey satellite in orbit around their hot little prospect. This was a Terra-type planet; even with an eccentric tilt, eventually someone was going to want to claim it. The satellite should have been up there collecting data on planet three, on the entire system, and on random comings and goings within the system, if any. It should have been broadcasting warnings to incoming ships about the system's status—charted but unexplored, under bio-quarantine until checked out, possibly dangerous, native sentients unknown, landing prohibited.

  The satellite was either missing or silent.

  "Accidents do happen," Alex said cautiously, as Tia came in closer, decelerating steadily, and prepared to make orbit. "Sometimes those babies break."

  She made a sound of disbelief. "Not often. And what are the odds? It should at least be giving us the navigational bleep, and there's nothing, nothing at all." She scanned for the satellite as she picked her orbital path, hoping to pick something up.

  "Oh, Tia—look at that rotation, that orbit! It could have gotten knocked out of the sky by something—" he began.

  "Could have, but wasn't. I've got it, Alex," she said with glee. "I found it! And it's deader than a burned-out glow-tube."

  She matched orbits with the errant satellite, coming alongside for a closer look. It was about half her size, so there was no question of bringing it inside, but as she circled it like a curious fish, there was one thing quite obvious.

  Nothing was externally wrong with it.

  "No sign of collision, and it wasn't shot at," Alex observed, and sighed. "No signs of a fire or explosion inside, either. You've tried reactivating it, I suppose?"

  "It's not answering," she said firmly. "Guess what? You get to take a walk."

  He muttered something under his breath and went after his pressure-suit. After the past few days in transition, his face had begun to heal, turning from black, blue and purple to a kind of dirty green and yellow. She presumed that the rest of him was in about the same shape—but he was obviously feeling rather sorry for himself.

  Do I snap at him, or do I kind of tease him along? she wondered. He hadn't been in a particularly good mood since the call from Chria. Was it that he was still in pain? Or was it something else entirely? There were so many signals of softperson body language that she'd never had a chance to learn, but there had been something going on during that interview—not precisely between Alex and Chria, though. More like, going on with Alex, because of Chria.

  Before she had a chance to make up her mind, he was at the airlock, suited up and tethered, and waiting for her to close the inner lock for him.

  She berated herself for wool-gathering and cycled the lock, keeping an anxious eye on him while she scanned the rest of the area for unexpected—and probably unwelcome—visitors.

  It would be just our luck for the looters to show up right about now.

  He jetted over to the access-hatch of the satellite and popped it without difficulty.

  Wait a moment—shouldn't he have had to unlock it?

  "Tia, the access hatch was jimmied," he said, his breath rasping in the suit-mike as he worked, heaving the massive door over and locking it down. "You were right, green all the way. The satellite's been sabotaged. Pretty crude work; they just disconnected the solar-cells from the instrument pack. It'll still make orbital corrections, but that's all. Don't know why they didn't just knock it out of the sky, unless they figured Survey has some kind of telltale on it, and they'd show up if it went down."

  "What should we do?" she asked, uncertainly. "I know you can repair it, but should you? We need some of the information it can give us, but if you repair it, wouldn't they figure that Survey had been through? Or would they just not notice?"

  "I don't want to reconnect the warn-off until we're ready to leave, or they'll definitely know someone's been eating their porridge," he replied slowly, as he floated half-in, half-out of the hatch. "If the satellite's telling them to take a hike as soon as they enter orbit, there won't be much doubt that someone from the authorities has been here. But you're right, and I not only want to know if someone shows up in orbit while we're down on the ground, I want the near-space scans it took before they shut it down, and I want it to keep scanning and recording. The question is, am I smart enough to make it do all that?"

  "I want the planetary records," she told him. "With luck, the ruins may show up on the scans. We might even see signs of activity where the looters have been digging. As for, are you smart enough—if you can get the solar arrays reconnected, I can reprogram every function it has. I'm CS, remember? We do work for Survey sometimes, so I have the access codes for Survey satellites. Trust me, they're going to work; Survey never seems to think someone might actually want to sabotage one of their satellites, so they never change the codes."

  "Good point." He writhed for a moment, upside-down, the huge blue-white globe behind him making an impressive backdrop. "Okay, give me a minute or two to splice some cable." Silence for a moment, except for grunts and fast breathing. "Good; it wasn't as awful as I thought. There. Solar array plugged back in. Ah, I have the link to the memory established. And—yes, everything is powering up, or at least that's what it looks like in here."

  She triggered memory-dump, and everything came over in compressed mode, loud and clear. All the near-space scans and all the geophysical records that had been made before the satellite was disabled. Surface-scans in all weathers, made on many passes across the face of the planet.

  But then—nothing. Whoever had disabled the satellite had known what he was doing—the memory that should have contained records of visitors was empty. She tried a number of ways of accessing it, only to conclude that the data storage device had been completely reformatted, nonsense had been written over all the memory, and it had been reformatted again. Not even an expert would have been able to get anything out of it now.

  "Can you hook in the proximity-alert with our com-system?" she asked.

  "I think so." He braced himself against the hatch and shoved himself a little farther inside. "Yes, it's all modular. I can leave just that up and powered, and if they aren't listening on this band, they won't know that there's been anyone up here diddling with it."

  A few moments more, and she caught a live signal on one of the high-range insystem comlinks, showing a nearby presence in the same orbit as the satellite. She felt her heart jump and started to panic—

  —then she scolded herself for being so jumpy. It was the satellite, registering her presence, of course.

  Alex closed the hatch and wedged it shut as it had been before, reeling himself back in on the tether. A moment later, her lock cycled, and he came back into the main cabin, pulling off his helmet and peeling off his suit.

  Tia spent some time reprogramming the satellite, killing the warn-off broadcast, turning all the near-space scanners on and recording. Then she turned her attention to the recordings it had already made.

  "So, what have we got?" he asked, wriggling to get the suit down over his hips. "Had any luck?"

  "There's quite a few of those ruins," she said carefully, noting with a bit of jealousy that the survey sat
ellite array was actually capable of producing sharper and more detailed images than her own. Then again, what it produced was rather limited.

  "Well, that's actually kind of promising." He slid out of the suit and into the chair, leaving the pressure-suit in a crumpled heap on the floor. She waited a moment until he was engrossed in the screen, then discretely sent a servo to pick it and the abandoned helmet up.

  "I'd say here or here," he said at last, pointing out two of the ruins in or near one of the mountain ranges. "That would give us the rain-snow pattern the first victim raved about. Look, even in the same day you'd get snow in the morning, rain in the afternoon, and snow after dark during some seasons."

  She highlighted those—but spotted three more possibilities, all three in areas where the tilt would have had the same effect on the climate. She marked them as well, and was rewarded by his nod of agreement.

  "All right. This has to be the planet. There's no reason for anyone to have disabled the satellite otherwise. Even if Survey or the Institute were sending someone here for a more detailed look, they'd simply have changed the warn-off message; they wouldn't have taken the satellite off-line." He took a deep breath and some of the tension went out of his shoulders. "Now it's just going to be finding the right place."

  * * *

  This was work the computers could do while Tia slept, comparing their marked areas and looking for changes that were not due to the seasons or the presence or absence of snow. Highest on the priority list was to look for changes that indicated disturbance while there was snow on the ground. Digging and tramping about in the snow would darken it, no matter how carefully the looters tried to hide the signs of their presence. That was a sign that only the work of sentients or herd-beasts would produce, and herd-beasts were not likely to search ruins for food.

  Within the hour, they had their site—there was no doubt whatsoever that it was being visited and disturbed regularly. Some of the buildings had even been meddled with.

  "Now why would they do that?" Tia wondered out loud, as she increased the magnification to show that one of the larger buildings had mysteriously grown a repaired roof. "They can't need that much space—and how did they fix the roof within twenty-four hours?"