Ship Who Searched (35 page)

“If it’s not that bad,” Alex said fretfully, “then why is it taking forever to melt a tunnel up and out?”

“Because no one ever intended these little servos to have to do something like that,” she replied, as patiently as she could. “They’re
welders
, not snow clearers. And they have to reinforce the tunnel with plastic shoring-posts so it doesn’t fall in and trap you.” He shook his head; she gave up trying to explain it. “They’re almost through, anyway,” she told him. “It’s about time to get into your suit.”

That would keep him occupied.

“This thing is getting depressingly familiar,” he complained. “I see more of the inside of this suit than I do my cabin.”

“No one promised you first-class accommodations on this ride,” she teased, trying to keep from showing her own nervousness. “I’ll tell you what; how about if I have one of the servos make a nice set of curtains for your helmet?”

“Thanks. I think.” He made a face at her. “Well, I’ll tell you this much; if I have to keep spending this much time in the blasted thing, I’m going to have some comforts built into it—or demand they get me a better model.” He twisted and turned, making sure he still had full mobility. “The sanitary facilities leave a lot to be desired.”

“I’ll report your complaints to the ship’s steward,” she told him. “Meanwhile—we have breakout.”

“Sounds like my cue.” Alex sighed. “I hope this isn’t going to be as cold as it looks.”

Alex crawled up the long, slanting tunnel to the surface, lighting his way with the work-lamp on the front of his helmet. Not that there was much to see—just a white, shiny tunnel that seemed to go on forever, reaching into the cold darkness . . . as if, with no warning, he would find himself entombed in ice forever. The plastic reinforcements were as white as the snow; invisible unless you were looking for them. Which was the point, he supposed. But he was glad they were there. Without them, tons of snow and ice could come crashing down on him at any moment. . . .

Stop that, he told himself sharply. Now is not the time to get claustrophobia.

Still, there didn’t seem to be any end to the tunnel—and he was cold, chilled right down to the soul. Not physically cold, or so his readouts claimed. Just chilled by the emptiness, the sterility. The loneliness . . .

You’re doing it again. Stop it.

Was the surrounding snow getting
lighter
? He turned off his helmet light—and it was true, there was a kind of cool, blue light filtering down through the ice and snow! And up ahead—yes, there was the mouth of the tunnel, as promised, a round, white “eye” staring down at him!

He picked up his pace, eager to get out of there. The return trip would be
nothing
compared to this long, tedious crawl—just sit down and push away, and he would be able to slide all the way down to the airlock!

He emerged into thickly falling snow and saw that the servos had wrought better than he and Tia had guessed, for the mouth of the tunnel was outside the area of avalanche, just under an overhanging ridge of stone. That must have been what the snow had built up upon; small wonder it buried Tia four meters under when she triggered it! Fortunately, snow could be melted; when they needed to leave, she could fire up her thrusters
and
increase the surface temperature of her skin, and turn it all to water and steam. Well, that was the theory, anyway.

That was assuming it didn’t rain and melt away her cover before then.

By Tia’s best guess, it was late afternoon, and he should be able to get to the site and look around a little before dark fell. At that point, the best thing he could do would be to get under cover somewhere and curl up for the night.
This
time he had padded all the uncomfortable spots in the suit, and he’d worn soft, old, exercise clothing. It shouldn’t be any less comfortable than some of his bunks as a cadet.

He took a bearing from the heads-up display inside his helmet and headed for the site.

“Tia,” he called. “Tia, come in.”

“Reading you loud and clear, Alex,” she responded immediately. Funny how easy it was to think of her as a person sitting back in that ship, eyes glued to the screens that showed his location, hands steady on the com controls—

Stop that. Maybe it’s a nice picture, but it’s one that can get you in more trouble than you already have.
“Tia, we have the right place, all right.” He toggled his external suit-camera and gave her a panoramic sweep from his vantage point above the valley holding the site. It was fairly obvious that this place was subject to some pretty heavy-duty windstorms; the buildings were all built into the lee of the hills, and the hills themselves had been sculpted by the prevailing winds until they looked like cresting waves. No doubt either why the entities who built this place used rounded forms; less for the winds to catch on.

“Does this look like any architecture in your banks?” he asked, panning across the buildings. “I sure as heck don’t recognize it.”

“Nothing here,” she replied, fascination evident in her voice. “This is amazing! That’s not metal, I don’t think—could it be ceramic?”

“Maybe some kind of synthetic,” Alex hazarded. “Plague or not, there are going to be murders done over the right to excavate this place. How in the name of the spirits of space did that Survey tech just dismiss this with ‘presence of structures’?”

“We’ll never know,” Tia responded. “Well, since there can’t be two sites like this in this area, and since these buildings match the ones in Hank’s holos, we can at least assume that we have the right planet. Now—about the caches—”

“I’m going down,” he said, feeling for footholds in the snow. It crunched under his feet as he eased down sideways, one careful step at a time. Now that he was out of Tia’s valley, there were signs everywhere of freeze-thaw cycles. Under the most recent layer of snow, the stuff was dirty and covered with a crust of granular ice. It made for perilous walking. “The wind is picking up, by the way. I think that blizzard followed us in.”

“That certainly figures,” she said with resignation.

As he eased over the lip of the valley, he saw the caves—or rather, storage areas—cut into the protected side of the face of a lower level canyon cutting through the middle of the valley. There were more buildings down there, too, and some kind of strange pylons—but it was the “caves” that interested him most. Regular, ovoid holes cut into the earth and rock that were then plugged with something rather like cement, a substance slightly different in color from the surrounding earth and stone. Those nearest him were still sealed; those nearest the building with the appearing–disappearing roof were open.

He worked his way down the valley to the buildings and found to his relief that there was actually a kind of staircase cut into the rock, going down to the second level. Protected from the worst of the weather by the building in front of it, while it was a bit slippery, it wasn’t as hazardous as his descent into the valley had been.

It was a good thing that the contents of Hank’s cabin and the holos the man had taken had prepared him for what he saw.

The wall of the valley where the storage caves had been opened looked like the inside of Ali Baba’s cave. The storage caches proved to be much smaller than Alex had thought; the “window” slits in the nearby building were tiny, as might have been expected in a place with the kind of punishing weather this planet had. That had made the caches themselves appear much larger in the holos. In reality, they were about as tall as his waist and no deeper than two or three meters. That was more than enough to hold a king’s ransom in treasure. . . .

Much hadn’t even been taken. In one of the nearest, ceramic statuary and pottery had been left behind as worthless—some had been broken by careless handling, and Alex winced.

There were dozens of caches that had been opened and cleaned out; perhaps a dozen more with less-desirable objects still inside. There were dozens more, still sealed, running down the length of the canyon wall—

And one whose entrance had been sealed with some kind of a heat-weapon, a weapon that had been turned on the entrance until the rock slagged and melted metal ran with it, mingling and forming a new, permanent plug.

“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.”