Anne McCaffrey - The Ship Who Searched

Alex closed the hatch and wedged it shut as it had been before, reeling himself back in on the tether. A moment later, her lock cycled, and he came back into the main cabin, pulling off his helmet and peeling off his suit.

Tia spent some time reprogramming the satellite, killing the warn-off broadcast, turning all the near-space scanners on and recording. Then she turned her attention to the recordings it had already made.

"So, what have we got?" he asked, wriggling to get the suit down over his hips. "Had any luck?"

"There's quite a few of those ruins," she said, carefully, noting with a bit of jealousy that the survey satellite array was actually capable of producing sharper and more detailed images than her own. Then again, what it produced was rather limited.

"Well, that's actually kind of promising." He slid out of the suit and into the chair, leaving the pressure-suit in a crumpled heap on the floor. She waited a moment until he was engrossed in the screen, then discretely sent a servo to pick it and the abandoned helmet up.

"I'd say here or here," he said at last, pointing out two of the ruins in or near one of the mountain ranges. "That would give us the rain-snow pattern the first victim raved about. Look, even in the same day you'd get snow in the morning, rain in the afternoon, and snow after dark during some seasons."

She highlighted those, but spotted three more possibilities, all three in areas where the tilt would have had the same effect on the climate. She marked them as well, and was rewarded by his nod of agreement.

"All right. This has to be the planet. There's no reason for anyone to have disabled the satellite otherwise. Even if Survey or the Institute were sending someone here for a more detailed look, they'd simply have changed the warn-off message; they wouldn't have taken the satellite off-line." He took a deep breath and some of the tension went out of his shoulders. "Now it's just going to be finding the right place."

This was work the computers could do while Tia slept, comparing their marked areas and looking for changes that were not due to the seasons or the presence or absence of snow. Highest on the priority list was to look for changes that indicated disturbance while there was snow on the ground. Digging and tramping about in the snow would darken it, no matter how carefully the looters tried to hide the signs of their presence. That was a sign that only the work of sentients or herd-beasts would produce, and herd-beasts were not likely to search ruins for food.

Within the hour, they had their site. There was no doubt whatsoever that it was being visited and disturbed regularly. Some of the buildings had even been meddled with.

"Now why would they do that?" Tia wondered out loud, as she increased the magnification to show that one of the larger buildings had mysteriously grown a repaired roof. "They can't need that much space, and how did they fix the roof within twenty-four hours?"

"They didn't," Alex said flatly. "That's plastic stretched over the hole. As to why, the hole is just about big enough to let a twenty-man ship land inside. Hangar and hiding place all in one."

They changed their position to put them in geo-synchronous orbit over their prize, and detailed scans of the spot seemed to indicate that no one had visited it very recently. The snow was still pristine and white, and the building she had noted had a major portion of its roof missing again.

"That's it," Alex said with finality.

Tia groaned. "We know, and we can't prove it. We know for a fact that someone is meddling with the site, but we can't prove the site is the one with the plague. Not without going down."

"Oh, come on, Tia, where's your sense of adventure?" Alex asked, feebly. "We knew we were probably going to have to go down on the surface. All we have to do is go down and get some holos of the area just like the ones Hank took. Then we have our proof."

"My sense of adventure got left back when I was nearly hijacked," she replied firmly. "I can do without adventure, thank you."

And she couldn't help herself; she kept figuratively glancing over her shoulder, watching for a ship. Would it be armed? She couldn't help but think of Pol, bristling with weaponry, and picturing those weapons aimed at her. Unarmed. Unarmored. Not even particularly fast.

On the other hand, she was a brainship, wasn't she? The product of extensive training. Surely if she couldn't outrun or outshoot these people, she could out-think them. Surely.

Well, if she was going to out-think them, the first thing she should do would be to find a way to keep them from spotting her. So it was time to use those enhanced systems on the satellite to their advantage.

"What are you doing?" Alex asked, when she remained silent for several minutes, sending the manual-override signal to the satellite so that she could use the scanners.

"I'm looking for a place to hide," she told him. "Two can play that game. And I'm smaller than their ship; I shouldn't need a building to hide me. I'll warn you, though, I may have to park a fair hike away from the cache sites."

It took a while; several hours of intense searching, while Alex did what he could to get himself prepared for the trip below. That amounted mostly to readying his pressure-suit for a long stay; stocking it with condensed food and water, making certain the suit systems were up to a week-long tour, if it came to that. Recharging the power-cells, triple-checking the seals, putting tape on places that tended to rub and a bit of padding on places that didn't quite fit, everything that could be done to his suit, Alex was doing. They both knew that from the time he left her airlock to the time he returned and she could purge him and the lock with hard vacuum, he was going to have to stay in it.

Finally, in mid-afternoon by the 'local' time at the site below them, she found what she was looking for. "I found my hiding place," she said into the silence, startling him into jumping. "Are you ready?"

"As ready as I'll ever be," he said, a little too jauntily. Was it her imagination, or did he turn a little pale? Well, if she had been capable of it, she'd have done the same. As it was, she was so jittery that she finally had to alter her blood-chemistry a little to deal with it.

"Then strap down," she told him soberly. "We're heading right into a major weather system and there's no getting around it. This is going to be tricky, and the ride is likely to be pretty rough."

Alex took the time to strap down more than himself; he made a circuit of the interior, ensuring that anything loose had been properly stowed before he took his place in the com chair. Only then, when he was double-strapped in, did Tia make the burn that began their descent.

Their entry was fairly smooth until they were on final approach and hit thick atmosphere and the weather that rode the mid-levels. The wild storm winds of a blizzard buffeted her with heavy blows; gusts that came out of nowhere and flung her up, down, in any direction but the one she wanted. She fought her way through them with grim determination, wondering how on earth the looters had gotten this far. Surely with winds like this, the controls would be torn right out of the grip of a softperson's hands!

Of course, they could be coming down under the control of an AI. Once the course had been programmed in, the AI would hold to it. And within limits, it would deal with unexpected conditions all the way to the surface.

Within limits. That was the catch. Throw it too for off the programmed course, and it wouldn't know what to do. Never mind, she told herself. You need to get down there yourself!

A little lower, and it wasn't just wind she was dealing with, it was snow. A howling blizzard, to be precise. One that chilled her skin and caked snow on every surface, throwing off her balance by tiny increments, forcing her to recalculate her descent all the way to the ground. A strange irony, she who had never seen weather as a child was now having to deal with weather at its wildest.