"I'm gettin' to that. Weren't no signs of life, okay. But there was some buildings there, old and kinda' busted up, round, like them flyin' saucers people used to see. I figgered maybe I'd hit some place where the archies hadn't got to, mebbe I could pick up something I could peddle. I went ahead an' landed, okay? Only I found somethin' that looked like somebody else had been there first. Looked like, I dunno, like somebody'd been collectin' and hoardin' for a long long time, buryin' the stuff in caves by the building, stashin' it in the buildings that wasn't busted up. Some of it was dug up already, some of it somebody'd just started t'dig up."
"How do you mean?" Alex asked.
"Like, somebody's kid's idea of a treasure place. Caves, lots of 'em, some of 'em dug up, all of 'em still prob'ly had stuff in 'em." Hank's voice started to slur with fatigue, but he seemed willing to continue, so Tia let him.
"Anyway, I got down there, grabbed some of the good stuff, took lots of holos so if I ever figured out where it was, I could stake a legal claim on it." He sighed. "I was keepin' my mouth shut, partly 'cause I don't trust these company goons, partly 'cause I figured on goin' back as soon as I got cured." He coughed, unhappily. "Well, it don't much look like I'm gonna get cured up any time soon, does it?"
"I can't promise anything but the pain meds, Hank," Tia said softly.
"Yeah." He licked cracked and swollen lips with a pale tongue. "Look, you get into my ship. See if the damn recorder was workin' at all. Get them holos, see if you can figure out where the devil I was, from 'em. You guys are CS, ev'body knows you can trust CS. If there's anything I can get outa this, see what you can do, okay?" The last was more of a pathetic plea than anything else.
"Hank, I can guarantee you this much, since you've cooperated, there's some kind of reward system with MedService for people who cooperate in closing down plagues," Alex said, after a few moments of checking with regs. "It includes all medical covered, including prosthetics and restorations, and full value of personal possessions confiscated or destroyed. That should include your ship and cargo. We'll itemize the real value of your cargo if we can."
Hank just sighed, but it sounded relieved. "Good," he replied, his voice fading with exhaustion. "Knew I could... trust CS. Lissen, can I get some'f that pain med now?"
Tia logged the authorization and activated the servonurse. "Coming up, Hank," she said. The man turned his head slightly as he heard the whine of the motor, and his eyes followed the hypospray until it touched his arm. "From now on, you just voice-activate the servo, tell it 'DM-Tia' and it will know what to give you." There was a hiss, then for one moment, what was left of his swollen lips curved in something like a smile. Tia closed down the link, after locking in the 'on-demand' authorization. It would take someone from CenCom MedServices to override it now.
Meanwhile, Alex had been arguing with Dock Services, and finally had to pull rank on them to get access to the controls for the dock servos and remotes. Once that was established, however, it was a matter of moments for Tia to tie herself in and pick out a servo with a camera still inside the quarantined area to send into the ship.
She selected the most versatile she could find; one with a crawler base, several waldos of various size and strength, and a reasonable optical pickup. "We aren't going to tell them that hard vacuum kills the bugs yet, are we?" she asked, as she activated the servo and sent it crawling towards the abandoned dock.
"Are you kidding?" Alex snorted. "Given the pass the credit attitude around here, I may never tell them. Let Kenny do it, if he wants, but I'd be willing to bet that the moment we tell them, they'll seal off the section and blow it, then go in and help themselves to whatever's on Hank's ship before we get a chance to make a record of it."
"I won't take that bet," she replied, steering the crawler up the ramp and into the still-gaping airlock.
Hank hadn't exaggerated when he'd said his ship was a wreck; it had more patches and make-dos on it than she had dreamed possible on a ship still in space and operating. Half the wall-plates were gone on the inside of the lock; the floor-plates were of three different colors. And when she brought the crawler into the control cabin, it was obvious that the patchworking probably extended to the entire ship.
Exposed wiring was everywhere; the original control panels had long ago been replaced by panels salvaged from at least a dozen other places. Small wonder the ship had a tendency to fall out of hyper; she was surprised it ever managed to stay in hyper, with all the false signals that should be coming off those boards.
"You think the recorder caught where he went?" Alex asked doubtfully, peering at the view in the screen. The lighting was in just as poor shape as everything else, but Tia had some pretty sophisticated enhancement abilities, and the picture wasn't too bad. The ship's 'black box' recorder, that should have registered everything this poor old wreck had done, was in no better shape than the rest of the ship.
"Either it did, or it didn't," she said philosophically. "We have a pattern of where he was supposed to be going though, and where he thought he was heading when he left our little plague-spot. We should be able to deduce the general area from that."
"Ah, and since we know the planetary type, if Survey ever found it, we'll know where it is." Alex nodded as his hands raced across the keyboards, helping Tia with the complex servo. "Look, there's the com, I think. Get the servo a little closer, and I'll punch up a link to us."
"Right." She maneuvered the crawler in between two seats with stuffing oozing out of cracks in the upholstery, and got the servo close enough to the panel that Alex could reach it with one of the waldos. While he punched in their access com-code, she activated the black box, plugged the servo into it, and put it on com uplink mode with another waldo. She would have shaken her head, if she could have. Not only was all of this incredibly jury-rigged, it actually looked as if many of the operations that should have been automatic had deliberately been made manual.
"I can't believe this stuff," she said, finally. "It must have taken both hands and feet to fly this wreck!"
"It probably did," Alex observed. "A lot of the old boys are like that. They don't trust AIs, and they'll tell you long stories about how it's because someone who was a friend of a friend had trouble with one and it nearly killed him or wrecked his ship. The longer they stay out here, the odder they get that way."
"And CenCom worries about us going loonie," she replied, making a snorting sound. "Seems to me there's a lot more to worry about with one of these old rock-rats."
"Except that there's never been a case of one of them going around the bend in a way that endangered more than a couple of people," Alex replied. Just about then, one of Tia's incoming lines activated. "There. Have I got you live, lover?"
"Yes, and I'm downlinking now." The black box burped its contents at her in a way that made her suspect more than one gap in its memory-train. Oh well. Maybe we'll get lucky. "Should we go check out the holds now?"
"Not the holds, the cabins," Alex corrected. "The holds will probably be half-full of primary-processed metals, or salvage junk. He'll have put his loot from the site in the cabins, if it was anything good."
"Good enough." She backed the servo out, carefully, hoping to avoid tangling it in anything. Somehow she actually succeeded; she wasn't quite sure how. She had no real 'feeling' from this servo; no sense of where its limbs were, no feedback from the crawler treads. It made her appreciate her shipbody all that much more. With the kinesthetic input from her skin sensors and the internals, she knew where everything was at all times, exactly as if she had grown this body herself.