"Ready?" Keff asked.
"Ready," she said.
"You're on-line, Lady Fair." He sat back in the sling, and she saw a flash of gauntlets as he crossed his arms.
Opening the peripheral to the alien computer, Carialle activated the Tambino's hard storage. She allowed first a trickle, then, when nothing bad happened, a flood of memory to upload.
"There's a lot of garbage," Carialle commented, watching bits of data pass or fail to pass through some of her screens. Bad bytes bounced away, disintegrating into sparkle. Now and again she saw a spray of them like a meteor shower when the crystal structure of the disk-matrix was violated. "They've been experimenting with that keyboard, but they didn't know how to purge bad files or compress over bad sectors. I'm dumping them."
"Wait," Keff said. "Keep them. I might get some linguistics clues out of them."
With a sigh, Carialle rescued the data and put it in a separate memory column. "All yours, Sir Knight, and on your own head be it." She began to see graphics and maps appearing in the datastream. "I think I've located the original astrogation program." The Central Worlds Exploration Service logo, as familiar to her as her own engrams, appeared again and again at the head of files. She ran comparisons with her own memory base at half her normal hyperspeed, to make certain she was processing all of the data carefully. Graphics of star systems blinked by rapidly on her optic and neural inputs, in tandem with the screens in her main cabin and in the griffins' control room. The square script that took the place of Standard notation was unreadable, but it was impossible to confuse the starmaps for anything other than what they were.
"Do any of them mean anything to you?" Keff asked. "Is this a record of their own people's exploration? Do they overlap with CW astrogation?"
"Yes, they do overlap," Carialle said, narrating absently as she checked her internal directories. She allowed various diagrams to linger in the tanks in turn long enough for her brawn's slower consciousness to register them. "Too much. That's an actual space station, and that's a colony system, and that's an asteroid belt with a mining center… all this stuff is in Central Worlds records. I can't believe in identical exploration patterns, even identical fly-bys of every single system. That would suggest there are thousands of these junk ships flitting all over the galaxy, unnoticed. This information must have been in the database when it was stolen. Hmm. Some of the files have been accessed recently. The Griffins must use it to look for targets, where they pick up their 'merchandise.'"
"The mining lasers they used on us," Keff said grimly, nodding. "They must have forced one of the early victims to show them how the computer system works. What about their own star system-where do they live? Does anything stand out? Can you pick out the one that doesn't belong?"
"Of a hundred billion systems? I don't keep full files from Exploration-naturally not. They wouldn't fit in my database, and if they did, it wouldn't leave me room for anything else. But I do have an index. It'll just take some time."
"Look at this," Carialle said, about an hour later. Keff stood up from where he'd been doing stretching exercises on the black stone floor and clambered back into the sling. The Cridi, having exhausted the curiosities of the dome, crowded around him. They ignored the griffins.
Carialle accessed Keff's monitor and put up three columns of entries. "All of these match exploration files I possess, but they date from around ten years ago. There's nothing newer, except for a couple of files I don't have," Carialle said, highlighting the entries. "I want to see the inside of that ship. Let's cross-reference these with the navicomp onboard. I have an itch in my diodes that says one of these is the lucky number."
"Well, let's spin the wheel and find out," Keff said, rising and laying a hand on the monitor in view of her camera eye. "Cari, does this setup control life support in any way?"
Carialle sent the tiniest filament of a feeler out of the protective shell she had made for herself, and threaded it down through Keff's cable, into the alien database. Beyond the wall, the power fed through a comprehensive filter from a horribly dirty source, probably a thermodynamic-based turbine. She shuddered and backed away from it. This computer had once controlled many other units' systems. The residue of Standard language programming still resided in the CPU, showing titles such as Galley, Engineering, Medical, and Electronic Maiclass="underline" personal, crew. Carialle felt anger which she quickly extinguished. Retribution for the dead humans and Cridi would come in time, but not at her hands. She let the tendril explore the only other open door that existed in the memory unit, a roughly-hewn portal bristling with bad data. It led to an open communications node and the landing beacon. She guessed by the microseconds it took to reach it that the node lay hundreds of kilometers away on the planet's surface.
"No," she said at last. "Not that I can see. It's a database and ground control, but nothing else."
"Good," Keff said. "I won't kill these people, but I don't want them telling anyone we've been here." He turned to the Cridi, and made a twisting gesture with both hands.
The Cridi responded tentatively at first. Narrow Leg used his amulet to rip the cables from the wall, precipitating a shower of sparks. Tall Eyebrow tore apart the umbilicals joining the peripherals to the main unit with a delicate pop! pop! pop! The other Cridi watched. Big Voice, still suffering from shock, put out a tentative hand. He raised the screen a couple of meters in the air, and dropped it. The screen flickered slightly. He picked it up again, and dashed it to the ground, almost under the nose of one of the Griffins. The plastic smashed into particles on the stone floor. Big Voice floated above it, looking triumphant.
"There! There is for my near death!" he exclaimed, his shrill voice rising. "That for the ships who disappeared!" His unholy exultation roused the others. They tore apart the computer components with wrenching gestures, scattering pieces all over the room. Keff, Tall Eyebrow and Narrow Leg watched with dismay and astonishment as civilized engineers and statesmen wreaked destruction with wild eyes and flailing hands.
The outburst was over as quickly as it had begun, and the Cridi stood about in their globes amid the ruins of the computer, looking ashamed of themselves.
"Reaction," Narrow Leg said at last, his hands quivering just a little. "It was bound to come. We must leave before the temptation to further revenge becomes too strong."
Keff agreed. He shepherded the Cridi out of the ruined control room, and into the corridor. He heard no sound but the lonely boom of his own footsteps and the wheeze of the air compressors as he followed the Cridi toward the arboretum. In the corridor, the remaining four aliens who had not participated in the brawl were bunched just outside the door, arrested in the act of leaping forward. Keff felt a shudder. He had been frozen by Core power himself, and felt sympathy for the beasts even if they were killers. Although their faces didn't change, he sensed their reproach-and their anger.
"Let's do this quickly," he said, turning away. "I don't like leaving them like that."
In the arboretum, Keff pushed his way through the spiky, blue foliage to the front of the dome, and looked out. The gangway was still attached to the side of the damaged ship, leaving no gap to the outer atmosphere.
"How did you get in here?" he asked Tall Eyebrow.
The globe-frog pantomimed through the side of his traveling sphere the raising and lowering of a curtain, a door, and another curtain. To demonstrate, he rolled across the glossy floor to the edge of the flexible airlock. Without touching the controls, the Cridi raised the heavy bumper and vanished underneath. Keff heard a faint peeping sound inside. The others floated or rolled after him.