“Damn their hides.”
“It happened a long time ago,” I said.
“Doesn’t matter.”
The next room might have been a VR chamber. We checked the equipment, which was locked in place, and in fact everything in that room was secured, and the door had been closed, so it was in decent condition. Not that the equipment would work, of course. But it looked good. And I could see Alex brighten, mentally tagging some of the gear for shipment home.
Then we found more signs of vandals, more damage to stationary objects. “They probably came in on a looting expedition,” he said. “Got exasperated at the conditions, and started breaking things up.”
Yeah. Those looters are just terrible.
But maybe they’d gotten discouraged too soon. We eventually wandered into what appeared to be the control room. And that was where we found the jade bracelet.
And the corpse.
The bracelet was on the left wrist. It was black, and engraved with an ivy branch.
The corpse was in pieces, and the pieces were adrift. The torso was moving across the deck when we moved in. At first I didn’t know what it was. It was mummified, and it looked as if it had been either a woman or a child. While we were trying to decide about that, I discovered the bracelet. The arm was the only limb still attached.
It wasn’t readily visible unless you handled the remains. Don’t ask me why I did.
It was just that the corpse shouldn’t have been there, and I wondered what had happened.
And there was the bracelet. “I think she got left behind,” I told Alex. There was no sign of a pressure suit, so she hadn’t been with the vandals.
We had nothing to wrap her in, no way to secure the body. Alex stood staring at her a long time. Then he looked around the room. There were three control positions.
They opened the outer doors remotely, maintained station stability, managed communications, kept an eye on life support, probably controlled the bots that serviced the living quarters.
“I think you’re right,” he said at last.
“Probably didn’t check when they left to be sure they had everybody.”
He looked at me. “Maybe.”
She was shriveled, dry, the face smoothed out, the features missing altogether. I thought how it must have been when she realized she’d been left behind. “If it really happened,” Alex said, “it had to have been deliberate.”
“You mean, because she could have called them? Let them know she was here?”
“That’s one reason.”
“If they were shutting down the station,” I said, “they’d have killed the power before they left. She might not have known how to turn it back on.” He rolled his eyes. “So what other reason is there?”
“They’d have used a team for a project like shutting down the station. There’s no way someone could have been here and not noticed what was going on. No. This was deliberate.”
Three walls had been converted into display screens. There was lots of electronic gear. The rear wall, the one the corpse was climbing, was given over to an engraving of the mountain eagle that for centuries was the world symbol of the Shenji Imperium. Two phrases were inscribed below the eagle.
“What’s it say?” I asked.
Alex had a translator. He poked the characters into it and made a face. “ The Compact. It’s the way the Shenji of that era referred to their nation, which was a polity of individual states. The Compact. ” He hesitated. “The second term is harder to translate. It means something like Night Angel. ”
“Night Angel?”
“Well, maybe Night Guardian. Or Angel of the Dark. I think it’s the name of the station.”
An outstation always had a dozen or so rooms set aside as accommodations for travelers. You want to stay overnight, and maybe even sneak someone into your apartment without the rest of the world finding out, this was the place to do it. The room usually consisted of a real bed, as opposed to the fold-outs on the ships. Maybe a chair or two. A computer link. Possibly a small table and a reader.
The compartments at the Night Angel were located two decks above the control room and about a kilometer away. We were looking to see if any appeared to have been lived in, but the passage of time was too great, and the contents of the rooms too thoroughly scrambled, so it was impossible to determine whether any of them might have been used by the victim.
Eventually, we opened an airlock and, after retrieving the bracelet, gave the body to the void. I wasn’t sure it was the proper thing to do. After all, she’d been dead a long time and had herself become an object of archeological interest. I had no doubt Survey would have liked to have the corpse. But Alex wouldn’t hear of it. “I don’t like mummies,” he said. “Nobody should be put on display after they’re dead. I don’t care how long ago they died.”
Sometimes he got sentimental.
So we watched her drift away, then we went back inside. The best finds came out of one of the dining rooms. Fortunately, everything there had been locked down, and it was in good condition. We spent two hours gathering glasses and plates and chairs, and especially stuff that had the station’s name on it, Night Angel. That’s where the money is. Anything with a seal. We also collected circuit boxes, switches, keyboard panels whose Shenji inscriptions, after a careful cleaning, were still visible.
We removed vents and blowers and the AI (a pair of gray cylinders) and a water nozzle and a temperature gauge and a hundred other items. It was by far our best day at the outstation.
We found a group of seventeen wineglasses, carefully stored, each glass engraved with the image of the mountain eagle. That alone would be worth a small fortune to a collector. We needed two more days to haul everything back to the BelleMarie.
Alex, celebrating our success, gave me a raise and invited me to take a couple of souvenirs. I picked out some settings, dinner dishes, saucers, cups, and silver.
Everything except the silver was made of cheap plastic, but, of course, that didn’t matter.
When we’d filled Belle ’s storage area, there were still some decent items left over. Not great stuff, but okay. We could have come back to get them, made another flight, but Alex said no. “It’ll be part of the bequest to Survey.”
By God he was a generous man.
“We’ve got the pick of the merchandise,” he continued. “Survey will send the rest of it around to every major museum in the Confederacy. And they’ll be representing us. Everywhere they go on display, Rainbow will be mentioned.”
As we slipped away from the platform, Alex asked what I made of the corpse.
“Left by a boyfriend,” I suggested. “Or a husband.”
Alex looked at me oddly, as if I’d said something unreasonable.
TWO
History is a collection of a few facts and a substantial assortment of rumors, lies, exaggerations, and selfdefense. As time passes, it becomes increasingly difficult to separate the various categories.
- Anna Greenstein,
The Urge to Empire We left the Shenji outstation just after breakfast on the tenth day. We used nine hours to charge the quantum drive, so we were back in the home system in time for a late dinner. Of course, we needed another two days to travel from the arrival point to Skydeck, the Rimway orbital station.
I was in favor of calling a press conference to announce our find, but Alex asked me coolly who I thought would come.
“Everybody,” I said, honestly surprised that he didn’t see the advantage in culling maximum publicity out of the discovery.
“Chase, nobody cares about a two-thousand-year-old space station. You do, for obvious reasons. And a handful of collectors. And maybe some researchers. But to the general public, it’s not sexy. It’s just a piece of leftover junk.”
So okay. I gave in, grumbling a bit over a lost opportunity to talk to the media people. I confess I enjoy the spotlight, and I love being interviewed. So while we cruised into the inner system, I contented myself by putting together an inventory and writing a cover letter detailing what we’d found. Alex changed the emphasis here and there, and we transmitted it to our assorted clients and other possibly interested parties, and also to most of the major museums on Rimway. It described a dozen or so of the objects we’d brought back, advising prospective buyers to get in touch if they wanted to see the complete inventory. So when we docked at Skydeck, nobody was there, and no bands played. But we already had a few bids.