Luck was further on their side; he'd made datahedron copies of everything, including the holos, and those could be uplinked to AH-One-Oh-Three-Three. There would be no need to bring anything out of the quarantined dock area.
It took them several hours to find a way to bring up the reader in the control cabin, then link the reader into the com system, but once they got a good link established, it was a matter of nanoseconds and the precious recordings were theirs.
She guided the servo towards the lock and swiveled the optic back for a last look, and realized that she still had control over a number of the ship's functions via the servo.
'Alex,' she said slowly, 'it would be a terrible thing if the airlock closed and locked, wouldn't it? That would mean even if station ops blew the section to decontaminate it, they wouldn't be able to get into the ship, or even get it undocked. They'd never know exactly what was on board.'
Alex blinked in bewilderment for a moment, then slowly grinned. 'That would be terrible, wouldn't it?' he agreed. 'Well, goodness, Tia, I imagine that they'd probably dither around about it until somebody from CenCom showed up, somebody with authority to confiscate it and hold it for decontamination and evaluation.'
'Of course,' she continued smoothly, sending a databurst to the servo, programming it to get the airlock to shut and lock up. 'And you know, these old ships are so unreliable, what if something happened to the ship's systems that made it vent to vacuum? Why then, even if the station managers decided to try and short-circuit the lock, they couldn't get it open against a hard vacuum. They'd have to bring in vacuumwelders and cut the locks open, and that would damage their own dock area. That would just be such an inconvenience.'
'It certainly would.' Alex said, stifling a laugh.
She sent further instructions to the ship and noted with glee the ship proceeding to vent out the spaceward side. The servo noted hard vacuum on one of its sensors in a fairly reasonable length of time.
Satisfied that no one was going to be able to break into Hank's ship and pilfer his treasure, she sent a last set of instructions to the servo, shutting it down until she sent it an activation key. No one was going to get into that ship without her cooperation.
Hank would get a finder's fee, if nothing else, based on the value of the artifacts he had found. But now it would be based on the true value of what he had found, and not just what was left after the owners of Presley Station took their pick of the loot. Assuming they left anything at all.
'Well,' she said, when she had finished. 'We'd better get to work. Are you any good at deciphering black box recordings?'
'Tolerably,' Alex replied. 'Tell you what; you analyze the holos while I diddle the black box data, then we'll switch.'
'Provided you don't get gold-fever again,' she warned him, opening the data on his screens.
The holos showed exactly what Hank had reported. A series of caves. Caves that looked to have been actually cut into the bluffs beside the ruined building. The nearest were completely dug up, and plainly emptied, but beyond them, there was another series of caves that were open to the air and still held treasure. But this wasn't like anything Tia had ever seen before. Each one of those caves, rather than being some kind of grave or other archeological entity, was clearly nothing more than a cache, and each one held precious objects from an entirely different culture than the one next to it. The two nearest the camera in the first holo held sacred objects from two cultures that were lightyears apart, and from ages when neither civilization had attained even interplanetary flight, much less starflight.
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
