Brain Ships - Anne McCaffrey [114]
"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 geosynchronous 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