Alex closed the hatch and wedged it shut as it had been before, reeling himself back in on the tether. A moment later, her lock cycled, and he came back into the main cabin, pulling off his helmet and peeling off his suit.
Tia spent some time reprogramming the satellite, killing the warn-off broadcast, turning all the near-space scanners on and recording. Then she turned her attention to the recordings it had already made.
'So, what have we got?' he asked, wriggling to get the suit down over his hips. 'Had any luck?'
'There's quite a few of those ruins,' she said, carefully, noting with a bit of jealousy that the survey satellite array was actually capable of producing sharper and more detailed images than her own. Then again, what it produced was rather limited.
'Well, that's actually kind of promising.' He slid out of the suit and into the chair, leaving the pressure-suit in a crumpled heap on the floor. She waited a moment until he was engrossed in the screen, then discretely sent a servo to pick it and the abandoned helmet up.
'I'd say here or here,' he said at last, pointing out two of the ruins in or near one of the mountain ranges. 'That would give us the rain-snow pattern the first victim raved about. Look, even in the same day you'd get snow in the morning, rain in the afternoon, and snow after dark during some seasons.'
She highlighted those, but spotted three more possibilities, all three in areas where the tilt would have had the same effect on the climate. She marked them as well, and was rewarded by his nod of agreement.
'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 geo-synchronous 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
