Ship Who Searched

by Mercedes Lackey

  “Do you think that’s where the plague bug came from?” Tia asked in his ear.

  “I think it’s a good bet, anyway,” he said absently. “I sure hope so, anyway.”

  Suddenly, with the prospect of contamination looming large in his mind, the shine of metal and sheen of priceless ceramic lost its allure. Whether it is or isn’t, there is no way I am going to crack this suit, I don’t care what is out there. Hank and the other man drifted in his memory like grisly ghosts. The suit, no longer a prison, had just become the most desirable place in the universe.

  Oh, I just love this suit. . . .

  Nevertheless, he moved forward towards the already-opened caches, augmenting the fading light with his suit-lamp. The caches themselves were very old; that much was evident from the weathering and buildup of debris and dirt along the side of the canyon wall. The looters must have opened up one of the caches out of sheer curiosity or by accident while looking for something else. Perhaps they had been exploring the area with an eye to a safe haven. Whatever had led them to uncover the first, they had then cleared away the buildup all along the wall, exposing the rest. And it looked as if the loot of a thousand worlds had been tucked away here.

  He began taking careful holos of every thing that had been left behind, Tia recording the tiniest details as he covered every angle, every millimeter. At least this way, if anything more was smashed there would be a record of it. Some things he picked up and stashed in his pack to bring back with him—a curious metal book, for instance—

  Alex moved forward again, reaching out for a discarded ceramic statue of some kind of winged biped—

  “Alex!” Tia exclaimed urgently. He started back, his hand closing on empty air.

  “What?” he snapped. “I—”

  “Alex, you have to get back here now,” she interrupted. “The alarms just went off. They’re back, and they’re heading in to land right now!”

  “Alex!” Tia cried, as her readouts showed the pirates making their descent burn and Alex moving away from her, not back in. “Alex, what are you doing?”

  Dusk was already making it hard to see out there, even for her. She couldn’t imagine what it was like for him.

  “I’m going to hide out in the upper level of one of these buildings and watch these clowns,” Alex replied calmly. “There’s a place up on this one where I can get in at about the second-story level—see?”

  He was right; the structure of the building gave him easy hand- and foot-holds up to the window-slits on the second floor. Once there, since the building had fallen in at that point, he would be able to hide himself up above eye-level. And with the way that the blizzard was kicking up, his tracks would be hidden in a matter of moments.

  “But—” she protested. “You’re all alone out there!” She tried to keep her mind clear, but a thousand horrible possibilities ran around and around inside her thoughts, making her frantic. “There’s no way I can help you if you’re caught!”

  “I won’t be caught,” he said confidently, finding handholds and beginning his climb.

  It was already too late anyway; the pirates had begun entry. Even if he left now, he’d never make it back to the safety of the tunnel before they landed. If they had heat-sensors, they couldn’t help but notice him, scrambling across the snow.

  She poured relaxants into her blood and tried to stay as calm as he obviously felt, but it wasn’t working. As the looters passed behind the planet’s opposite side, he reached the top of the first tier of window-slits, moving slowly and deliberately—so deliberately that she wanted to scream at him to hurry.

  As they hit the edge of the blizzard, Alex reached the broken place in the second story. And just as he tumbled over the edge into the relatively safe darkness behind the wall, they slowed for descent, playing searchlights all over the entire valley, cutting pathways of brightness across the gloom and thickly falling snow.

  Alex took advantage of the lights, moving only after they had passed so that he had a chance to see exactly what lay in the room he had fallen into.

  Nothing, actually; it was an empty section with a curved inner and outer wall, one door in the inner wall, and a wall at either end. Roughly half of the curving roof had fallen in; not much, really. Dirt and snow mounded under the break, near the join of end wall and outer wall the windows were still intact, and the floor was relatively clean. That was where Alex went.

  From there he had a superb view of both the caches and the building that the looters were slowly lowering their ship into. Tia watched carefully and decided that her guess about an AI in-system pilot was probably correct; the movements of the ship had the jerkiness she associated with AIs. She kept expecting the looters to pick up Alex’s signal, but evidently they were not expecting anyone to find this place—they seemed to be taking no precautions whatsoever. They didn’t set any telltales or any alerts, and once they landed the ship and began disembarking from it, they made no effort to maintain silence.

  On the other hand, given the truly appalling weather, perhaps they had no reason to be cautious. The worst of the blizzard was moving in, and not even the best of AIs could have landed in that kind of buffeting wind. She was just glad that Alex was under cover.

  The storm didn’t stop the looters from sending out crews to open up a new cache, however. . . .

  She could hardly believe her sensors when she saw, via Alex’s camera, a half-dozen lights bobbing down the canyon floor coming towards his hiding place. She switched to IR scan and saw that there were three times that many men, three to a light. None of them were wearing pressure-suits, although they were bundled up in cold weather survival gear.

  “I don’t believe they’re doing that,” Alex muttered.

  “Neither do I,” she replied softly. “That storm is going to be a killing blizzard in a moment. They’re out of their minds.”

  She scanned up and down the radio wavelengths, looking for the one the looters were using. She found it soon enough; unmistakable by the paint-peeling language being used. While Alex huddled in his shelter, the men below him broke open yet another cache and began shoveling what were probably priceless artifacts into sacks as if they were so many rocks. Tia winced, and thought it likely that Alex was doing the same.

  The looters were obviously aware that they were working against time; their haste alone showed the fact that they knew the worst of the storm was yet to come. Whoever was manning the radio back at the ship kept them appraised of their situation, and before long, he began warning them that it was time to start back, before the blizzard got so bad they would never be able to make it the few hundred meters back to their ship.

  They would not be able to take the full fury of the storm—but Alex, in his pressure-suit, would be able to handle just about anything. With his heads-up helmet displays, he didn’t need to be able to see where he was going. Was it possible that he would be able to sneak back to her under the cover of the blizzard?

  It was certainly worth a try.

  The leader of the looters finally growled an acknowledgement to the radio operator. “We’re comin’ in, keep yer boots on,” he snarled, as the lights turned away from the cache and moved slowly back up the canyon. The operator shut up; a moment later a signal beacon shone wanly through the thickening snow at the other end of the tiny valley. Soon the lights of the looters had been swallowed up by darkness and heavy snowfall—then the beacon faded as the snow and wind picked up still more.

  “Alex,” she said urgently, “do you think you can make it back to me?”

  “Did you record me coming in?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she assured him. “Every step. I ought to be able to guide you pretty well. You won’t get a better chance. Without the storm to cover you, they’ll spot you before you’ve gone a meter.”

  He peered out his window again, her camera “seeing” what he saw—there was nothing out there. Wind and snow made a solid wall just outside the building. Even Tia’s IR scan couldn’t penetrate it.


  “I’ll try it,” he said. “You’re right. There won’t ever be a better chance.”

  Alex ignored the darkness outside his helmet and concentrated on the HUD projected on the inner surface. This was a lot like fly-by-wire training—or virtual reality. Ignore what your eyes and senses wanted you to do and concentrate on what the instruments are telling you.

  Right now, they said he was near the entrance to the valley hiding Tia.

  It had been a long, frightening walk. The pressure-suit was protection against anything that the blizzard flung at him, but if he made a wrong step—well, it wouldn’t save him from a long fall. And it wouldn’t save him from being crushed by an avalanche if something triggered another one. Snow built up quickly under conditions like this.

  It helped to think of Tia as he imagined her; made him feel warm inside. She kept a cheerful monologue going in his left ear, telling him what she had identified from the holos they’d made before the looters arrived. Sometimes he answered her, mostly he just listened. She was warmth and life in a world of darkness and cold, and as long as he could think of her sitting in the pilot’s seat, with her sparkling eyes and puckish smile, he could muster the strength to keep his feet moving against the increasingly heavy weight of the snow.

  Tired—he was getting so tired. It was tempting to lie down and let the snow cover him for a while as he took a little rest.

  “Alex—you’re here—” she said suddenly, breaking off in the middle of the sentence.

  “I’m where?” he said stupidly. He was so tired—

  “You’re here—the entrance to the tunnel is somewhere around there—” The urgency in her voice woke him out of the kind of stupor he had been in. “Feel around for the rock face—the tunnel may be covered with snow, but you should be able to find it.”

  That was something he hadn’t even thought of! What if the entrance to the tunnel had filled in? He’d be stuck out here in the blizzard, nowhere to go, out alone in the cold!

  Stop that! he told himself sternly. Just stop that! You’ll be all right. The suit heaters won’t give out in this—they’re made for space, a little cold blizzard isn’t going to balk them!

  Unless the cold snow clogged them somehow . . . or the wind was too much for them to compensate for . . . or they just plain gave up and died. . . .

  He stumbled to his right, hands out, feeling frantically in the darkness for the rock face. He stumbled into it, cracking his faceplate against the stone. Fortunately the plate was made of sterner stuff than simple polyglas; although his head rang, the plate was fine.

  Well, there was the rock. Now where—

  The ground gave away beneath his feet, and he yelled with fear as he fell—the back of his head smacked against something and he kept falling—

  No—

  No, he wasn’t falling, he was sliding. He’d fallen into the tunnel!

  Quickly he spread hands and feet against the wall of the tunnel to slow himself and toggled his headlamp on; it had been useless in the blizzard. Now it was still pretty useless, but the light reflecting from the white ice above his face made him want to laugh with pleasure. Light! At last!

  Light—and more of it down below his feet. The opposite end of the tunnel glowed with warm, white light as Tia opened the airlock and turned on the light inside it. He shot down the long dark tunnel and into the brightness, no longer caring if he hit hard when he landed. Caring only that he was coming home.

  Coming home. . . .

  CHAPTER NINE

  The whisper of a sensor-sweep across the landscape—like the brush of silk across Tia’s skin, when she’d had skin. Like something not-quite-heard in the distance.

  Tia stayed quiet and concentrated on keeping all of her outputs as low as possible. We aren’t here. You can’t find us. Why don’t you just fill your holds and go away?

  What had been a good hiding place was now a trap. Tia had shut down every system she could; Alex moved as little as possible. She had no way of knowing how sophisticated the pirates’ systems were, so they were both operating on the assumption that anything out of the ordinary would alert the enemy to their presence, if not their location.

  Whether or not the looters’ initial carelessness had been because of the storm or because of greed—or whether they had been alerted by something she or Alex had done—now they were displaying all the caution Tia had expected of them. Telltales and alarms were in place; irregular sensor sweeps made it impossible for Alex to make a second trip to the ruins without being caught.

  And now there were two more ships in orbit that had arrived while the blizzard still raged. One of those two ships had checked the satellite. Had they found Alex’s handiwork, or were they simply following a procedure they had always followed? She had no way of knowing.

  Whatever the case, those two ships kept her from taking off—and she wasn’t going to transmit anything to the satellite. It was still broadcasting, and they only hoped it was because the pirates hadn’t checked that closely. But it could have been because the pirates wanted them lulled into thinking they were safe.

  So Tia had shut off all nonessential systems, and they used no active sensors, relying entirely on passive receptors. Knowing that sound could carry even past her blanket of snow, especially percussive sounds, Alex padded about in stocking feet when he walked at all. Three days of this now—and no sign that the looters were ready to leave yet.

  Mostly he and Tia studied holos and the few artifacts that he had brought out of the cache area—once Tia had vacuum-purged them and sterilized them to a fare-thee-well.

  After all, she kept telling herself, the pirates couldn’t stay up there forever. Could they?

  Unless they had some idea that Tia was already here. Someone had leaked what they knew about Hank and his cargo when they were on Presley Station. The leak could have gone beyond the station.

  She was frightened and could not tell him; strung as tightly as piano strings with anxiety, with no way to work off the tension.

  She knew that the same thoughts troubled Alex, although he never voiced them. Instead, he concentrated his attention completely on the enigmatic book of metal plates he had brought out of the cache.

  There were glyphs of some kind etched into it, along the right edge of each plate, and a peculiarly matte-finished strip along the left edge of each. But most importantly, the middle of each page was covered with the pinprick patterns of what could only be stellar configurations. Having spent so much time studying stellar maps, both of them had recognized that they were nav-guides immediately. But to what—and far more importantly, what was the reference point? There was no way of knowing that she could see.

  And who had made the book in the first place? The glyphs had an odd sort of familiarity about them, but nothing she was able to put a figurative finger on.

  It was enough of a puzzle to keep Alex busy, but not enough to occupy her. It was very easy to spend a lot of time brooding over her brawn. Slumped in his chair, peculiarly handsome face intent, with a single light shining down on his head and the artifact, with the rest of the room in darkness—or staring into a screen full of data—

  Like a scene out of a thriller-holo. The hero, biding his time, ready to crack under the strain but not going to show his vulnerability; the enemies waiting above. Priceless data in their hands, data that they dared not allow the enemy to have. The hero, thinking about the lover he had left behind, wondering if he will ever see her again—

  Shellcrack. This was getting her nowhere.

  She couldn’t pace, she couldn’t bite her nails, she couldn’t even read to distract herself. Finally she activated a single servo and sent it discreetly into his cabin to clean it. It hadn’t been cleaned since they’d left the base; mostly Alex had just shoved things into drawers and closets and locked the doors down. She couldn’t clean his clothing now—but as soon as they shook the hounds off their trail—

  If they shook the hounds off their trail—if the second avalanche and the blizzard h
adn’t piled too much snow on top of them to clear away. There were eight meters of snow up there now, not four. Much more, and she might not be able to blast free.

  Stop that. We’ll get out of this.

  Carefully she cleaned each drawer and closet, replacing what wasn’t dirty and having the servo kidnap what was. Carefully, because there were lots of loose objects shoved in with the clothing.

  But she never expected the one she found tumbled in among the bedcoverings.

  A holocube—of her.

  She turned the cube over and over in the servo’s pinchers, changing the pictures, finding all of them familiar. Scenes of her from before her illness; the birthday party, posing with Theodore Bear—

  Standing in her brand new pressure-suit in front of a fragment of wall covered with EsKay glyphs—that was a funny one; Mum had teased Dad about it because he’d focused on the glyphs out of habit. She’d come out half out of the picture, but the glyphs had been nice and sharp.

  It hit her like a jolt of current. The glyphs. That was where she had seen them before! Oh, these were carved rather than inscribed, and time and sandstorms had worn them down to mere suggestions. They were formed in a kind of cursive style, where the ones on the book were angular—but—

  She ran a quick comparison and got another jolt, this time of elation. “Alex!” she whispered excitedly. “Look!”

  She popped the glyphs from the old holo up on her screen as he looked up, took the graphic of the third page of the book, and superimposed the one over the other. Aside from the differences in style, they were a perfect match.

  “EsKays,” he murmured, his tone awestruck. “Spirits of space—this book was made by the EsKays!”

  “I think these caches and buildings must have been made by some race that knew the EsKays,” she replied. “But even if they weren’t—Alex, how much will you wager that this little set of charts shows the EsKay homeworld, once you figure out how to decipher it?”