Seeker (2 page)

The domes appeared to be in good condition. Alex watched them with growing satisfaction as we descended through the black sky. A half dozen moons were visible. They were pale, ghostly, barely discernible in the feeble light from the central star. Had you not known they were there, you might not have seen them.

I eased us in carefully. When we touched down I shut the engines off and brought the gravity back slowly. Alex waited impatiently while I exercised what he routinely called a surplus of feminine caution. He’s always anxious to get moving — let’s go, we don’t have forever. He enjoys playing that role. But he doesn’t like unpleasant surprises either. And that’s supposed to be my job, heading them off. I broke through the bottom of a crater years ago into a sinkhole, and he still hasn’t let me forget it.

Everything held. Alex gave me a big smile, well-done and all that. The talk about let’s move it along got put aside while he sat looking out the viewport, savoring the moment. You go into one of these places, a site that’s been empty for centuries or maybe millennia, and you never know what you might find. Some have been rigged with death traps. Floors have been known to collapse and walls to give way. In one way station, air pressure built up when something malfunctioned and it all but exploded when a Survey team tried to enter.

What you always hope for, of course, is an open hatch and a map of the premises. Like they found at Lyautey.

I unbuckled and waited for Alex. Finally, he took a deep breath, released his harness, swung the chair around, climbed out of it, and pulled on his air tanks. We ran a radio check and inspected each other’s suits. When he was ready I decompressed and opened the hatch.

We climbed down the ladder onto the surface. The ground was crumbly. Sand and iron chips. We saw myriad footprints and tracks from vehicles. Untouched down the centuries.

“Last ones out, you think?”
Alex asked.

“Wouldn’t be surprised,” I said. I was more interested in the view. A slice of the rings and two moons were visible just above the mountains.

“Something wrong,”
Alex said.

“What?” The domes were dark and quiet. Nothing moved on the plain, which stretched to the southern horizon. Nothing unusual in the sky.

In the dark I couldn’t see Alex’s face, encased in his helmet. But he seemed to be looking at the nearest dome. No, past it at one of the other units, the northernmost, which was also the largest of the four.

There was an open door.

Well, not open in the sense that the hatch was ajar. Someone had cut into it. Had cut a large hole that we should have seen coming down if we’d been paying attention.

Alex grumbled something over the circuit about vandals and started angrily toward it. I fell in behind. “Watch the gravity,” I said, as he stumbled but caught himself.

“Damned thieves.”
Alex delivered a series of imprecations.
“How’s this possible?”

It was hard to believe that someone had beaten us here because artifacts from Gideon V had never appeared on the market. And there was no historical record that the base had been found.

“Has to be recent,” I said.

“You mean
yesterday
?”
he asked.

“Maybe they didn’t know what they had. Just broke in, looked around, and left.”

“It’s possible, Chase,”
he said.
“Maybe it happened centuries ago. When people still remembered where this place was.”

I hoped he was right.

It was usually the case that when archeologists found a ransacked site, the ransacking had been done within a few hundred years of the era during which the site had operated. After a reasonable length of time, people forget where things are. And they get permanently lost. I sometimes wonder how many ships are floating around out in the dark, having blown an engine and eventually faded from the record.

I should mention that we’re not archeologists. We’re strictly business types, matching collectors with merchandise, and sometimes, as now, hunting down original sources. This had looked like a gold mine moments ago. But now — Alex was holding his breath as we approached the opening.

The hatch had been cut away by a torch. It lay off to one side. And there was only the lightest coating of dust on it. “
This just happened
,” he said. I’ll confess that Alex is not exactly even-tempered. At home, in social circumstances, he’s a model of courtesy and restraint. But in places like that lunar surface, where society is a long way off, I occasionally get to see his real feelings. He stared at the fallen door, picked up a rock, said something under his breath, and threw the rock halfway into orbit.

I stood there, a kid in the principal’s office. “Probably my fault,” I said.

The inner hatch was also down. Beyond it, the interior was dark.

He looked at me. The visor was too opaque to allow me to see his expression, but it wasn’t hard to imagine. “
How do you mean
?” he asked.

“I told Windy.” Windy was Survey’s public relations director, and a longtime friend.

Alex wasn’t appreciably taller than I am, but he seemed to be towering over me. “
Windy wouldn’t say anything
.”

“I know.”

“You told her over an open circuit.”

“Yeah.”

He sighed. “
Chase, how could you do that
?”

“I don’t know.” I was trying not to whine. “I didn’t think there’d be a problem. We were talking about something else and it just came up.”

“Couldn’t resist?”

“I guess not.”

He planted one boot on the hatch and shoved. It didn’t budge. “
Well
,” he said, “
no help for it now
.”

I straightened my shoulders. Shoot me if it’ll make you feel better. “Won’t happen again.”

“It’s okay.”
He was using his spilled-milk voice.
“Let’s go see how much damage they did.”

He led the way in.

The domes were connected by tunnels. Staircases led to underground spaces. These places are always ghostly, illuminated only by wrist lamps. Shadows chase themselves around the bulkheads, and there seems always to be something moving just outside the field of vision. I remember reading how Casmir Kolchevsky was attacked in a place like this by a security bot that he had inadvertently activated.

The vandals had been relentless.

We wandered through the operational sections, through a gym, through private living quarters. Through a kitchen and dining room. Everywhere we went, drawers were pulled out and their contents dumped. Cabinets were cut open, storage lockers broken apart. The place had been ransacked. There wasn’t much remaining that could have been put up for sale or would have been of interest to a museum. We found ourselves treading carefully past broken glass and data disks and overturned tables. Some clothing will survive for a surprisingly long time in a vacuum. But we found only a handful of pieces, most of them victims of whatever chemicals had been in the original material. Or sufficiently mundane that nobody would have cared. It doesn’t much matter where a pullover shirt has come from. Unless it’s been worn by a legendary general or an immortal playwright, nobody cares. But the jumpsuits, which usually carry a shoulder patch, or a stenciled identity over a pocket, GIDEON BASE or some such thing, are worth their weight. We found only one, badly frayed. The inscription was of course in Celian characters, framing a tall, narrow peak. “
The station’s emblem
,” said Alex.

They’d also stripped the operations center. Electronic gear had been taken. They’d torn the panels apart to get access. Again, the objective had been to find parts marked as belonging to the base. It looked as if anything not meeting that standard had been yanked out and dropped on the deck.

Alex was in a rage by the time we were finished. All four domes, and the underground network, had been treated the same way. There’d been one exception to the general chaos. We found a common room, littered with debris. The deck was covered with projectors and readers, and data crystals that would have gone dry long before six centuries had passed. A broken pitcher and some ice lay in one corner, and a partially torn-up carpet had been dragged into another. But a small table stood in the center of the room, and a book lay open on it, arranged for the convenience of anyone seated in the lone chair.

“Well,” I said, looking down at it, “at least it won’t be a complete blowout. That thing will bring some money.”

Or maybe it wouldn’t.

It was last year’s edition of
The Antiquarian Guide
.

“Look as if the vandal knew we’d be here,” Alex said. “He’s saying hello.”

I told him he was an idiot. I explained that he was auctioning off our history, converting it to baubles and handing it over to people who had no concept who Mike Esther was. And that when he was finished, when the last crystal had been taken from the museum and sold to the jewelers, there would be nothing left of the men and women who had built our world. He smiled and shook his head and I thought for a moment that his voice caught. “Old friend,” he said, “they are already long gone.”
— Haras Kora,
Binacqua Chronicles,
4417 C.E.

Winetta Yashevik was the archeological liaison at Survey, and she doubled as their public relations chief. Windy was the only person to whom I’d revealed our destination, but I knew she would never have given information away to any of Alex’s rivals. She was a true believer. In her view, we turned antiquities into commodities and sold them to private buyers. It was an offense against decency, and she always contrived, without saying anything directly, to make me feel that I was ethically unfit. I was, if you like, the lost sheep. The one that had been corrupted by the mendacity of the world and didn’t seem able to find its way home.

It was easy enough for her to sit in judgment. She’d been born into wealth and never known what it was to go without anything. But that’s another matter.

When I stopped by her office at the Survey complex, on the second floor of the Kolman building, she brightened, waved me inside, and closed the door. “You’re back more quickly than I expected. Did you not find the place? I hope.”

“It was there,” I said. “Right where Alex said it would be. But somebody got there first and broke in.”

She sighed. “Thieves everywhere. Well, anyhow, congratulations. Now you know how the rest of us feel when you and Alex have taken over a site.” She paused, smiled as if she wanted me to think she didn’t want to hurt my feelings, just kidding, you know how it is. But she was enjoying herself. “Were you able to make off with anything at all?”

I ignored the phraseology. “The place was cleaned out,” I said.

Her eyes slid shut. I saw her lips tighten, but she said nothing. Windy was tall, dark, passionate about the things she believed in. No halfway measures. Me she tolerated because she wasn’t going to throw a friendship overboard that went all the way back to when we were both playing with dolls. “No idea who they were?”

“No. It happened recently, though. Within the last year. Maybe within the last few days.”

Her office was big. There were pictures from various missions on the paneled walls, as well as a scattering of awards. Winetta Yashevik, Employee of the Year; Harbison Award for Outstanding Service; Appreciation from the United Defenders for contributions to their Toys for Kids program. And there were pictures from excavations.

“Well,” she said, “I’m sorry to hear it.”

“Windy, we were trying to figure out how it happened.” I took a deep breath. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but as far as we can figure, you’re the only one who knew in advance where we were going.”

“Chase,” she said, in a level tone, “you told me to keep it quiet, and I did. You also know I would never help one of these
vandals
.”

“We know that. But we were wondering if the information got passed on in any way? If anybody else in the organization knew?”

“No,” she said, “I’m sure I didn’t tell anybody.” She thought about it. “Except Louie.” That was a reference to Louis Ponzio, the director.

“Okay. That probably means somebody’s listening in on us.”

“Could be.” She looked uncomfortable. “Chase, we both know the director doesn’t run the tightest ship on the planet.”

Actually I didn’t know.

“That may or may not have been the problem. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything.”

“It’s okay. It was probably the comm system.”

“Whatever. Listen, Chase—”

“Yes?”

“I wouldn’t want you to feel you can’t tell me things.”

“I know. It’s not a problem.”

“Next time—”

“I know.”

Fenn Redfield, Alex’s old police buddy, was at the country house when I got back. Alex had told him what happened. Not an official complaint, of course. There was none to be made. “But there’s a possibility somebody’s doing some eavesdropping.”

“Wish I could help,” he said. “You guys just have to be more careful what you say over an open circuit.” Fenn was short, stocky, a walking barrel with green eyes and a deep bass voice. He had never married, loved to party, and played cards regularly in a small group with Alex.

“Isn’t it illegal to eavesdrop on people?” I asked.

“Not really,” he said. “Such a law would be unenforceable.” He made a face to suggest he was thinking it over. “But it
is
illegal to own enabling equipment. I can keep an ear open, but what you
should
do, Alex, is install a scrambler system.”

That sounded good, but it wasn’t very practical when you’re trying to solicit calls from new clients. So Fenn assured us he’d let us know if they learned anything, which meant, of course, that we were on our own.

We had lunch before going back to the office. Alex is big on lunch. He thinks a good lunch is what life is really about. So we stopped at the Paramount House and decided over sandwiches and potato salad that we would opt for a cryptosystem that would secure calls between Alex and me, and between the office and our more significant clients. And to Windy.