Ship Who Searched (21 page)

The evidence all pointed to a periodic change in the rodents’ digestive systems that enabled them to eat
anything
with a cellulose or petrochemical base, up to and including plastic.

The report concluded with the Evaluation team’s final words on the attitude of the current government of Largo Draconis, in a personal note that had been attached to the report.

“Fred: I am just glad we are getting
out
of here. We told the Settlement Governor about all this, and they’re ignoring us. They think that just because I’m an archeologist, I have my nose so firmly in the past that I have no grasp on the present. They told me in the governor’s office that their ward-off fields should be more than enough to hold off the rats. Not a chance. We’re talking about a feeding-frenzy here, furry locusts, and I don’t think they’re going to give a ward-off field a second thought. I’m telling you, Fred, these people are going to be in trouble in a year. The Megalts threw in the towel, and they weren’t anywhere near as backward as the governor thinks they were.
Maybe
this wonder ward-off field of his will keep the rats off, but I don’t think so. And I don’t want to find out that he was wrong by waking up under a blanket of rats. They didn’t eat the Megalts—but they ate their
clothes.
I don’t fancy piling into a shuttle with my derriere bared to the gentle breezes—which by that time should be, oh, around fifty kilometers per hour, and minus twenty Celsius. So I may even beat this report home. Keep the beer cold and the fireplace warm for me.”

Well.
If ever there was something that matched what Doctor Kenny had suggested, this was it.

Just to be certain, she checked several other sources—not for the veracity of the report, but to see just how prepared the colony was for the “rats” as well as the worsening weather.

Everything she found bore out what the unknown writer had told “Fred.” Ward-off generators were standard issue, not heavy-duty. Warehouses had metal doors—and many had plastic or wooden siding. Homes were made of native stone and well-insulated against the cold, but had plastic or wooden doors. Food had been stockpiled, but what would the colonists do when the “rats” ate through the warehouse sides to get at the stockpiled rations? The colony had been depending on food grown on-planet for the past twenty years. There were no provisions for importing food and no synthesizers of any real size. They had protein farms—but what if the “rats” got into them and ate the yeast-stock along with everything else? What would they do when the stockpiled food was gone? Or if they managed to save the food, what would they do when—as Fred had suggested—the “rats” ate through their doors and made a meal off their clothing, their blankets, their furniture. . . .

So much for official records. Was there
anyone
on-planet that could pull these people out of their disaster?

It took a full day of searching business-directories before she had her answer. An on-planet manufacturer of specialized protection equipment, including heavy-duty ward-off and protection-field generators, could provide protection once the planetary governor admitted there was a problem. Governmental resources might not be able to pay for all the protection the colonists needed—but over eighty percent of the inhabitants carried hazard insurance, and the insurance companies should pay for protection for their clients.

That was half of the answer. The other half?

Another firm with multi-planet outlets, and a load of old-fashioned synthesizers in a warehouse within shipping distance. They didn’t produce much in the way of variety, but load them up with raw materials, carbon from coal or oil, minerals, protein from yeast and fiber from other vat-grown products, and you had something basic to eat—or wear—or make into furnishings—

She set her scheme in motion. But
not
through Beta, her supervisor, but through Lars and his.

Before Alex returned, she had made all the arrangements; and she had included carefully worded letters to the two companies she had chosen—plus all of the publicly available records. She tried to convey a warning without sounding like some kind of crazed hysteric.

Of course, the fact that she was investing in their firms should at least convey the idea that she was an hysteric with money. . . .

If they had any sense, they would be able to put the story together for themselves from the records, and they would believe her. Hopefully, they would be ready.

She transmitted the last of the messages, just as Alex arrived at her airlock.

“Permission to come aboard, ma’am,” he called cheerfully, as she opened the lock for him. He ran up the stairs two at a time, and when he burst into the main cabin, she told herself that fashions would surely change, soon—he was dressed in a chrome yellow tunic with neon-red piping, and neon-red trousers with chrome-yellow piping. Both bright enough to hurt the eyes and dazzle the pickups, and she was grateful she could tune down the intensity of her visual receptors.

“How was your reunion?” she asked, once his clothes weren’t blinding her.

“There weren’t more than a half dozen of them,” he told her, continuing through the hall and down to his own cabin. He pitched both his bags on his bed, and returned. “We just missed Chria by a hair. But we had a good time.”

“I’m surprised you didn’t come back with a hangover.”

He widened his eyes with surprise. “Not me! I’m the Academy designated driver—or at any rate, I make sure people get on the right shuttles. Never touch the stuff, myself, or almost never. Clogs the synapses.”

Tia felt irrationally pleased to hear that.

“So, did you miss me? I missed you. Did you have enough to do?” He flung himself down in his chair and put his feet up on the console. “I hope you didn’t spend all your time reading Institute papers.”

“Oh,” she replied lightly, “I found a few other things to occupy my time. . . .”

The comlink was live, and Alex was on his very best behavior—including a fresh, and only marginally rumpled, uniform. He sat quietly in his chair, the very picture of a sober Academy graduate and responsible CS brawn.

Tia reflected that it was just as well she’d bullied him into that uniform. The transmission was shared by Professor Barton Glasov y Verona-Gras, head of the Institute, and a gray-haired, dark-tuniced man the professor identified as Central Systems Sector Administrator Joshua Elliot-Rosen y Sinor. Very high in administration. And just now, very concerned about something, although he hid his concern well. Alex had snapped to a kind of seated “attention” the moment his face appeared on the screen.

“Alexander, Hypatia—we’re going to be sending you a long file of stills and holos,” Professor Barton began. “But for now, the object you see here on my desk is representative of our problem.”

The “object” in question was a perfectly lovely little vase. The style was distinctive; skewed, but with a very sensuous sinuosity, as if someone had fused Art Nouveau with Salvador Dali. It seemed—as nearly as Tia could tell from the transmission—to be made of multiple layers of opalescent glass or ceramic.

It also had the patina that only something that has been buried for a very long time achieves.

Or something with a chemically faked patina.
But would the professor himself have called them if all he was worried about were fake antiquities? Not likely.

The only problem with the vase—if it was a genuine artifact—was that it did not match the style of any known artifact in any of Tia’s files.

“You know that smuggling and site-robbing has always been a big problem for us,” Professor Barton continued. “It’s very frustrating to come on a site and find it’s already been looted. But this—this is doubly frustrating. Because, as I’m sure Hypatia has already realized, the style of this piece does not match that of any known civilization.”

“A few weeks ago, hundreds of artifacts in this style flooded the black market,” Sinor said smoothly. “Analysis showed them to be quite ancient—this piece for instance was made some time when Ramses the Second was Pharaoh.”

The professor was not wringing his hands, but his distress was fairly obvious. “There are
hundreds
of these objects!” he blurted. “Everything from cups to votive offerings, from jewelry to statuary! We not only don’t know where they’ve come from, but we don’t even know anything
about
the people that made them!”

“Most of the objects are not as well-preserved as this one, of course,” Sinor continued, sitting with that incredible stillness that only a professional politician or actor achieves. “But besides being incredibly valuable, and not incidentally, funneling money into the criminal subculture, there is something else rather distressing associated with these artifacts.”

Tia knew what it
had
to be as soon as the words were out of the man’s mouth. Plague.

“Plague,” he said solemnly. “So far, this has not been a fatal disease, at least, not to the folk who bought these little trinkets.
They
have private physicians and in-house medicomps, obviously.”

High Families, Tia surmised. So the High Families are mixed up in this.

“The objects really aren’t dangerous, once they’ve been through proper decontam procedures,” the professor added hastily. “But whoever is digging these things up isn’t even bothering with a run under the UV gun. He’s just cleaning them up—”

Tia winced inwardly, and
saw
Alex wince. To tell an archeologist that a smuggler had “cleaned up” an artifact, was like telling a coin collector that his nephew Joey had gotten out the wire brush and shined up his collection for him.

“—cleaning them up, putting them in cases, and selling them.” Professor Barton sighed. “I have no idea why his helpers aren’t coming down with this. Maybe they’re immune. Whatever the reason, the receivers of these pieces
are
, they are not happy about it, and they want something done.”

His expression told Tia more than his words did. The High Families who had bought artifacts they must have known were smuggled and possibly stolen, and some members of their circle had gotten sick. And because the Institute was the official organization in charge of ancient relics, they expected the Institute to find the smuggler and deal with him.

Not that any of them would tell us how and where they found out about these treasures. Nor would they ever admit that they knew they were gray market, if not black. And if they’d stop buying smuggled artifacts, they wouldn’t get sick.

But none of that meant anything when it came to the High Families, of course. They were too wealthy and too powerful to ever find themselves dealing with such simple concepts as
cause
and
effect.

Hmm. Except once in a great while—like now—when it rises up and bites them.

“In spite of the threat of disease associated with these pieces, they are still in very high demand,” Sinor said.

Because someone in the High Families spread the word that you’d better run the thing through decontamination after you buy it, so you can have your pretty without penalty. But there was something wrong with this story. Something that didn’t quite fit. But she couldn’t figure out what it was.

Meanwhile, the transmission continued. “But I don’t have to tell either of you how dangerous it is to have these things out there,” Professor Barton added. “It’s fairly obvious that the smugglers are not taking even the barest of precautions with the artifacts. It becomes increasingly likely with every piece sold at a high price that someone will steal one, or find out where the source is, or take one to a disadvantaged area to sell it.”

A slum, you mean, Professor.
Was he putting too much emphasis on this?

Tia decided to show that both she and her brawn
were
paying attention. “I can see what could happen then, gentlemen,” she countered. “Disease spreads very quickly in areas of that sort, and what might not be particularly dangerous for someone of means will
kill
the impoverished.”

And then we have a full-scale epidemic and a panic on our hands.
But he had to know how she felt about this.
He
knew who she was—there weren’t too many “Hypatias” in the world, and he had been the immediate boss of Pota and Braddon’s superior. He had to know the story. He was probably trading on it.

“Precisely, Hypatia,” said Sinor, in an eerie “answer” to her own thoughts.

“I hope you aren’t planning on using us as smuggler hunters,” Alex replied, slowly. “I couldn’t pass as High Family in a million years, so I couldn’t be in on the purchasing end. And we aren’t allowed to be armed—I know I don’t want to take on the smuggling end without a locker full of artillery!”

In other words, gentlemen,
“
we ain’t stupid, we ain’t expendable, and we ain’t goin’.
” But this was all sounding a little too pat, a little too contrived. If Sinor told them that they
weren’t
expected to catch the smugglers themselves . . .

“No—” Sinor said soothingly—and a little too hastily. “No, we have some teams in the Enforcement Division going at both ends.
However,
it is entirely possible that the source for these artifacts is someone—or rather, several someones—working on Exploration or Evaluation teams. Since the artifacts showed up in this sector first, it is logical to assume that they originate here.”

Too smooth. Too pat. This is all a story. But why?

“So you want us to keep our eyes peeled when we make our deliveries,” Alex filled in.

“You two are uniquely suited,” Professor Barton pointed out. “You both have backgrounds in archeology. Hypatia, you know how digs work, intimately. Once you know how to identify these artifacts, if you see even a hint of them—shards, perhaps, or broken bits of jewelry—you’ll know what they are and where they came from.”

“We can do that,” Tia replied, carefully. “We can be a little snoopy, I think, without arousing any suspicions.”

“Good. That was what we needed.” Professor Barton sounded very relieved. “I suppose I don’t need to add that there is a bonus in this for you.”

“I can live with a bonus,” Alex responded cheerfully.