Anne McCaffrey - The Ship Who Searched

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 traffic was rather nice, all things considered.

Now if only they had a Singularity Drive.

Nevermind, she told herself, as she accelerated to hyper, we 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 nearspace 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 in-system 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.