Ship Who Searched (37 page)

So now he knew what she had looked like—and, thanks to computer-projection, what she would have looked like if she had never caught that hideous disease and had grown up normally. Why, she might even have wound up at the Academy, if she hadn’t chosen to follow in her famous parents’ footsteps. He knew most of the details, not only of her pre-shell life, but of her life at Lab Schools. He knew as much about her as he would have if she had been his own sibling—except that his feelings about her had been anything but brotherly.

But he had told himself that they
were
brotherly, that he was not falling in love with a kind of ghost, that everything would be fine. He’d believed it, too.

That is, up until he ran into Chria Chance and her gunner.

There was
no
doubt in his mind from the moment the screen lit up that Chria and Neil were an item. The signs were there for anyone who knew how to read body language, especially for someone who knew Chria as well as Alex did. And his initial reaction to the relationship caught him completely by surprise.

Envy. Sheer, raw, uncomplicated envy. Not jealousy, for he wasn’t at all interested in Chria and never had been. In some ways, he was very happy for her; she had been truly the poor little rich girl—High Family with four very proper brothers and sisters who were making the Family even more prestige and money. She alone had been the rebel; she of all of them had wanted something more than a proper position, a place on a board of directors, and a bloodless, loveless, high-status spouse. After she threatened to bring disgrace on all of them, blackmailing them by swearing she would join a shatter-rock synthocom band under her real name, they had permitted her the Academy under an assumed one.

No, he was happy for Chria; she had found exactly the life and partners that she had longed for.

But he
wanted
what she had—only he wanted it to be Tia sitting back there in the second seat. Or Tia in the front and himself in the back; it didn’t much matter who was the one in command, if he could have had her
there.

The strength of his feelings had been so unexpected that he had not known what to do with them—so he had attempted, clumsily, to cover them. Fortunately, everyone involved seemed to put his surliness down to a combination of pain from his injuries and wooziness due to the pain-pills he’d gulped.

If only it had been . . .

I’m in love with someone I can’t touch, can’t hold, can’t even tell that I love her, he thought with despair, clenching his hand tightly on the armrest of his chair. I—

“Alex?” Tia whispered, her voice sounding unnaturally loud in the silence of the ship, for she had turned even the ventilation system down to a minimum. “Alex, I’ve decoded the storage-mode. It’s old-fashioned hard-etched binary storage and I think that it’s nav directions that relate to the stellar map on the page. Once I find a reference point I recognize, I’m pretty sure I can decode it all eventually. I got some ideas, though, since I was able to match some place-name glyphs—and we were right—I’m positive that these are directions to all the EsKay bases from the homeworld! So if we could just find a base—”

“And trace it back!” This was what she’d been looking for from the beginning, and excitement
for
her shoved aside all other feelings for the moment. “What’s the deal—why the primitive navcharts? Not that it isn’t a break for us, but if they were space-going, why limit yourself to a crawl?”

“Well, the storage medium is pretty hard to damage; you wouldn’t believe how strong it is. So I can see why they chose it over something like a datahedron that a strong magnetic field can wipe. As for why the charts themselves are so primitive, near as I can make out, they didn’t have Singularity Drive and they could or would only warp
between
stars, using them as navigational stepping-stones. I don’t know why; there may be something there that would give the reason, but I can’t decode it.” There was something odd and subdued about her voice—

“What, hopping like a Survey ship?” he asked incredulously. “You could spend years getting across space that way!”

“Maybe they didn’t care. Maybe hyper made them sick.” Now he recognized what the odd tone in her voice was; she didn’t seem terribly excited, now that she had what she was looking for.

“Well,
we
don’t have to do that,” he pointed out. “Once we get out of here, we can backtrack to the EsKay homeworld, make a couple of jumps, and we’ll be stellar celebs! All we have to do is—”

“Is forget about our responsibilities,” she said, sharply. “Or else ‘forget’ to turn in this book with the rest of the loot until we get a long leave. Or turn it in and hope no one else beats us to the punch.”

Keeping the book was out of the question, and he dismissed it out of hand. “They won’t,” he replied positively. “No one else has spent as much time staring at star-charts as we have. You’ve said as much yourself; the archeologists at the Institute get very specialized and see things in a very narrow way. I don’t think that there’s the slightest chance that anyone will figure out what this book means within the next four or five years. But you’re right about having responsibilities; we
are
under a hard contract to the Institute. We’ll have to wait until we can buy or earn a long leave—”

“That’s not what’s bothering me,” she interrupted, in a very soft voice. “It’s—the ethics of it. If we hold back this information, how are we any better than those pirates out there?”

“How do you mean?” he asked, startled.

“Withholding information—that’s like data piracy, in a way. We’re holding back, not only the data, but the career of whoever is the EsKay specialist right now—Doctor Lana Courtney-Rai, I think. In fact, if we keep this to ourselves, we’ll be
stealing
her career advancement. I mean, we aren’t even
real
archeologists!” There was no mistaking the distress in her voice.

“I think I see what you mean.” And he did; he could understand it all too well. He’d seen both his parents passed over for promotions in favor of someone who hadn’t earned the advancement but who “knew the right people.” He’d seen the same thing happen at the Academy. It wasn’t fair or right. “We can’t do everything, can we?” he said slowly. “Not like in the holos, where the heroes can fight off pirates while performing brain surgery.”

Tia made a sad little chuckle. “I’m beginning to think it’s all we can do just to get our real job done right.”

He leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling. “Funny. When this quest of ours was all theoretical, it was one thing—but we really can’t go shooting off by ourselves and still do our duty, the duty that people are expecting us to do.”

She didn’t sigh, but her voice was heavy with regret. “It’s not only a question of ethics, but of priorities. We can simply go on doing what we do best—and Chria Chance really put her finger on it, when she pointed out that she and Neil and Pol wouldn’t know how to recognize our plague spot, and we would.
She
knows when she should let the experts take over. I hate to give up on the dream—but in this case, that dream was the kind of thing a kid could have, but—”

“But it’s time to grow up—and let someone else play,” Alex said firmly.

“Maybe we could go pretend to be archeologists,” Tia added, “but we’d steal someone else’s career in the process. Become second-rate—but very, very lucky amateur pot-hunters.”

He sighed for both of them. “They’d hate us, you know. Everyone we respected would hate us. And we’d be celebrities, but we wouldn’t be real archeologists.”

“Alex?” she said, after a long silence. “I think we should just seal that book up with our findings and what we’ve deduced about it. Then we should lock it up with the rest of the loot and go on being a stellar CS team. Even if it does get awfully boring running mail and supplies, sometimes.”

“It’s not boring now,” he said ruefully, without thinking. “I kind of wish it was.”

Silence for a long time, then she made a tiny sound that he would have identified as a whimper in a softperson. “I wish you hadn’t reminded me,” she said.

“Why?”

“Because—because it seems as if we’re never going to get out of here—that they’re going to find us eventually.”

“Stop that,” he replied sharply, reacting to the note of panic in her voice. “They can’t hover up there forever. They’ll run out of supplies, for one thing.”

“So will we,” she countered.

“And they’ll run out of patience! Tia, think—these are pirates, and they don’t even know there’s anyone else here, not for certain, anyway! When they don’t find anything, they’ll give up and take their loot off to sell!” He wanted, badly, to pace—but that would make noise. “We can leave when they’re gone!”

“If—we can get out.”

“What?” he said, startled.

“I didn’t want you to worry—but there’s been two avalanches since you got back, and all the snow the blizzard dropped.”

He stared at her column in numbed shock, but she wasn’t finished.

“There’s about eleven meters of snow above us. I don’t know if I can get out. And even if CenSec shows up, I don’t know if they’ll hear a hail under all this ice. I lost the signals from the surface right after that last avalanche, and the satellite signals are getting too faint to read clearly.”

He said the first thing that came into his head, trying to lighten the mood, but without running it past his internal censor first. “Well, at least if I’m going to be frozen into a glacier for all eternity, I’ve got my love to keep me warm.”

He stopped himself, but not in time. Oh, brilliant. Now she thinks she’s locked in an iceberg with a fixated madman!

“Do—” Her voice sounded choked, probably with shock. “Do you mean that?”

He could have shot himself. “Tia,” he began babbling, “it’s all right, really, I mean I’m not going to go crazy and try to crack your column or anything, I really am all right, I—”

“Did you
mean
that?” she persisted.

“I—”
Oh well. It’s on the record. You can’t make it worse.
“Yes. I don’t know, it just sort of—happened.” He shrugged helplessly. “It’s not anything crazy, like a fixation. But, well—I just don’t want any partner of
any
kind but you. If that’s love, then I guess I love you. And I really, really love you a lot.” He sighed and rubbed his temples. “So there it is, out in the open at last. I hope I don’t offend or frighten you, but you’re the best thing that ever happened to me, and that’s a fact. I’d rather be with you than anyone else I know, or know of.” He managed a faint grin. “Holostars and stellar celebs included.”

The plexy cover to Ted Bear’s little “shrine” popped open, and he jumped.

“I can’t touch you, and you can’t touch me, but—would you like to hug Theodore?” she replied softly. “I love you, too, Alex. I think I have ever since you went out to face the Zombie Bug. You’re the bravest, cleverest, most wonderful brawn I could ever imagine, and I wouldn’t want to be anyone’s partner but yours.”

The offer of her childhood friend was the closest she could come to intimacy—and he knew it.

He got up, carefully, and took the little fellow down out of his wall-home, hugging the soft little bear once, hard, before he restored him again and closed the door.

“You have a magnificent lady, Theodore Bear,” he told the solemn-faced little toy. “And I’m going to do my best to make her happy.”

He turned back to her column and cleared his throat, carefully. Time, and more than time, to change the subject. “Right,” he said. “Now that we’ve both established why we’ve been touchy—let’s see if we can figure out what our options are.”

“Options?” she replied, confused.

“Certainly.” He raised his chin defiantly. “I intend to spend the rest of my life with you—and I don’t intend
that
to be restricted to how long it takes before the pirates find us or we freeze to death! So let’s figure out some
options
, hang it all!”

To his great joy and relief, she actually laughed. And if there was an edge of hysteria in it, he chose to ignore that little nuance.

“Right,” she said. “Options. Well, we can start with the servos, I guess. . . .”

Tia snuggled down into his arms, and turned into a big blue toy bear. The bear looked at him reproachfully.

He started to get up, but the bedcoverings had turned to snowdrifts, and he was frozen in place. The bear tried to chip him out, but its blunt arms were too soft to make an impression on the ice-covered drifts.

Then he heard rumbling—and looked up, to see an avalanche poised to crash down on him like some kind of slow-motion wave—

The avalanche rumbled, and Tia-the-bear growled back, interposing herself between him and the tumbling snow—

“Alex, wake up!”

He floundered awake, flailing at the bedclothes, hitting the light button more by accident than anything else. He blinked as the light came up full, blinding him, his legs trapped in a tangle of sheets and blankets. “What?” he said, his tongue too thick for his mouth. “Who? Where?”

“Alex,” Tia said, her voice strained, but excited. “Alex, I have been trying to get you to wake up for fifteen minutes! There’s a CenSec ship Upstairs, and it’s beating the tail off those two pirates!”

CenSec? Spirits of space—

“What happened?” he asked, grabbing for clothing and pulling it on. “From the beginning—”

“The first I knew of it was when one of the pirates sent a warning down to the ship here to stay under cover and quiet. I got the impression that they thought it was just an ordinary Survey ship, until it locked onto one of them and started blasting.” Tia had brought up all of her systems again; fresher air was moving briskly through the ventilator, all the lights and boards were up and active in the main cabin. “That was when all the scans stopped—and I started breaking loose. I ran that freeze-thaw cycle you suggested, and a couple of minutes ago, I fired the engines. I can definitely move, and I’m pretty sure I can pull out of here without too much trouble. I might lose some paint and some bits of things on my surface, but nothing that can’t be repaired.”

“What about Upstairs?” he asked, running for his chair without stopping for shoes or even socks, and strapping himself down.