'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.
There were two cabins off the main one; the first was clearly Hank's own sleeping quarters, and Tia was amazed at how neat and clean they were. Somehow she had expected a rat's nest. But she recalled the pictures of the control room as she turned the servo to the other door, and realized that the control room had been just as neat and clean.
It was only the myriad of jury-rigs and quick-fix repairs that had given the impression of a mess. There wasn't actually any garbage in there, the floor and walls were squeaky-clean. Hank ran as clean a ship as he could, given his circumstances.
The second door was locked; Alex didn't even bother with any kind of finesse. Hank's ship would be destroyed at this point, no matter what they did or didn't do. One of the waldos was a small welding torch; Alex used it to burn out the lock.
The door swung open on its own, when the lock was no longer holding it. Tia suddenly knew how Lord Carnavon felt, when he peeked through the hole bored into the burial chamber of Tutankhamen.
''Wonderful things!'' she breathed, quoting him half-unconsciously.
Hank must have worked like a madman to get everything into that cabin. This was treasure, in every sense of the word. There was nothing in that cabin that did not gleam with precious metal or the sleekness of consummate artistry. Or both. The largest piece was a statue about a meter tall, of some kind of stylized winged creature. The smallest was probably one of the rings in the heaps of jewelry piled into the carved stone boxes on the floor, which were themselves works of high art If Hank could claim even a fraction of this legally, he could buy a new ship and still be a wealthy man.
If he lived to enjoy his wealth, that is.
He had stowed his loot very carefully, Tia saw, with the same kind of neat, methodical care that showed in his own cabin. Every box of jewelry was carefully strapped to the floor; every vase was netted in place. Every statue was lying on the bunk and held down by restraints. The cabin had been crammed as full as possible and still permit the door to open, but every single piece had been neatly stowed and then secured, so that no matter what the ship did, none of it would break loose. And so that none of it would damage anything else.
'Have we got enough pictures?' Alex asked faintly. 'I'm being overcome by gold-fever. I'd like to look for those holos before my avarice gets the better of my common sense, and I go running down there to dive into that stuff myself.'
'Right!' Tia said hastily, and backed the servo out again. The door swung shut after it, and Alex heaved a very real sigh of relief.
'Sorry, love,' he said apologetically. 'I never thought I'd ever react like that.'
'You've never been confronted with several million credits' worth of gold alone,' she replied soothingly. 'I don't even want to think what the real value of all of that is. Do you think he'd keep the holos in his cabin?'
'There's no place to stash them out in the control room,' Alex pointed out.
Once again, Hank's neat and methodical nature saved the day for them, and Tia knew why he hadn't bothered to tell them where he'd put his records. Once they entered his cabin, there next to a small terminal was a drawer marked 'Records,' and in the drawer were the hardcopy claim papers he'd intended to file and the holos he'd taken in a section marked 'Possible Claims'.
'Luck's on our side today,' Alex marveled. Tia agreed. It would have been far more likely that they'd have gotten some victim who'd refuse to divulge anything, or one who'd been half-crazed, or one who simply hadn't kept any kind of a record at all.
