Furthermore, the more Tia studied the holos, the more she came to the conclusion that the original caches were old; never mind who was digging them up now. The kind of weathering of the surface and layering of detritus she saw in the holos took hundreds, perhaps thousands of years to build up. And the buildings in one of the other holos were very old.
Nor did she recognize who could have constructed them.
So who could have been responsible for collecting all these treasures in the first place? Why had they buried them? Where did they get it all, and above all, why didn't they come back after it?
There was some evidence around the caves that the current looters had attempted to rebury their finds. But had they done so in an attempt to hide it again, or had they done it to try and kill the disease? How many of the looters were exposed? From the number of caves that had been broken into, it looked as if there had been quite a few people at work there.
Tia wished she could sit back and chew a nail or something. All she had now were questions and no answers. And the lives of other people might hang in the balance.
There was only one way to answer all those questions. They were going to have to find Hank's mystery planet and find out for themselves.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Tia didn't entirely trust the integrity of the Presley Station comcenter. She certainly expected that whatever she sent out would be monitored by the owners and their underlings. Unfortunately, there had been no provision for the need for secrecy in this mission; she had no codes and no scramblers. There had been no real reason to think that they would ever need such secrecy, so she was forced to send in the clear. Just to be on the safe side, she uplinked on her own and double-sent everything, but she knew that whatever she sent off that way would be subject to delays as it bounced from remote hyperwave relay-station to relay station, taking the long way 'home'.
As she had expected, the owners of the station were quick to move on the information that Hank's ship contained treasure, despite the fact that no one should have read her messages back to Kenny and the rest. She was just grateful that the owners' first thought was to grab what they could from the nearby trove, and not to try and figure out where Hank came from, or attempt to force him to tell them.
The first intimation that the communications had been leaked was when the station ops tried to claim the ship and all its contents for themselves; filing confiscation papers in the Central Systems Courts. When they discovered that Tia had already tied the ship and its contents up legally on Hank's behalf, they moved on the principle that 'possession is nine-tenths of the law, and the fellow arguing the other tenth has to prove it with a lawyer'.
They sent crews into the docks, to try and get into the ship to strip it of as much as they could. Tia's cleverness thwarted them, as they worked their way, slowly, through every step she'd expected.
She figured that by the time they were in a position to actually threaten Hank's possessions, the CS authorities would be on the scene in person. Meanwhile, she and Alex had some figuring to do. Where was Hank's cache-world? Same problem as before, except that this time the possible search area was smaller, and cone-shaped rather than spherical.
Unfortunately, there were some other people who wanted to get their hands on that same information.
And unknown to either of them, those people had decided that Alex and Tia were already privy to it.
Tia kept a careful eye on the activity around her slip just on general principles, even when she wasn't feeling nervous, but given their current circumstances, and the fact that they were the only Central Systems ship out here at the moment, she couldn't help but feel a bit, well, paranoid. At the moment, only three people knew for certain that she was a brainship; Hank, the traffic control officer who brought them in, and that doctor. She was pretty certain that the doctor hadn't mentioned it to his superiors; she knew Hank hadn't told anyone, and as jittery as the other man had been, he'd probably forgotten it.
No one addressed her when they called, at any rate, and she took pains to make callers think that she was an Al. So far, they seemed to be falling in with the deception. This wasn't a bad state of affairs; no one expected an AI to recognize dangers the way a real sentient could. She could tap into the optical scanners in the dock area around the ship and no one would have any notion that she was keeping watch. She made sure to schedule her three or four hours of DeepSleep while Alex was awake; normally taking them during his 'morning', while he was still rather grumpy and uncommunicative and she'd rather not talk to him anyway. And she scanned the recordings she made while she was under, just to be sure she didn't miss anything.
That was why, a few days after their interview with Hank, she noticed the man in the dock-crew uniform coverall who seemed to be working double shifts. Except that no one else was working double shifts... and what was more, there was currently a company prohibition against overtime as a cost-cutting measure.
Something wasn't right, and he never left the immediate area of her slip. What was he doing there? It wasn't as if she was either a freighter with goods to load or unload, or a passenger liner. She didn't need servicing either. He never got close enough that she could see exactly what he was up to, but it seemed to her that he was doing an awful lot of make-work.
She kept a close eye on him as he wandered around the dock area, purposefully, but accomplishing nothing that she could see. Gradually though, he worked his way in closer and closer to her slip, and little mental alarms began going off as she watched him and the way he kept glancing at her lock out of the corner of his eye.
Around sixteen-hundred she watched him removing control-panel plates and cleaning in behind them, work too delicate to trust to a servo.
Except that he'd just cleaned that same area two hours ago.
That was senseless; regs stated that the panels only had to be cleaned once every two weeks, not every two hours.
Furthermore, there was something not quite right with his uniform. It wasn't exactly the same color of gray as everyone else's; it looked crisply new, and the patches were just a little too bright There were plenty of dockworkers' uniforms in Presley storage, there was no reason for someone to have had a new one made up unless he was an odd size. And this man was as average as anyone could possibly be. He was so very unremarkable that she noticed his uniform long before she noticed him.
That was bad enough, but just as seventeen-hundred passed and everyone else in the dock-crew went on supper break, another man in that too-new uniform showed up, while the first man kept on puttering about.
"Alex?" she said, unhappily. "There's something going on out there I don't like."
He looked up from his perusal of Hank's holos; he had prints made from them spread out all over the floor and was sitting on his heels beside them. "What's up?" She filled him in quickly, as a third and a fourth person in that same uniform ambled into the dock.
There were now four crewman in the docks during break. All four of them in a dock area where there were no ships loading or unloading and no new ships expected to dock in the next twenty-four hours.